Authors

M Y Hussain¹; M WIESE ¹; G WESTROP¹; K C Carter¹;  ¹ Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Strathclyde

Discussion

Leishmaniasis is a disease that causes significant mortality and morbidity. In the last five years, 1 million cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) have been reported and 300,000 cases of visceral leishmaniasis (VL). There have been 20,000 deaths/year and 310 million people are at risk of infection. At present there is no clinical vaccine for this disease. We have shown that vaccination with recombinant (γGCS) produced in Eschericheria coli can protect against CL and VL in murine models. However in this expression vector truncated recombinant protein was produced. Therefore, we carried out studies to determine if we could produce better quality γGCS in L. tarentolae, which is phylogenetically more related to Leishmania. We successfully produced a construct that allowed transfection of L. tarnetolae with the gene sequence of γGCS from 3 different Leishmania species. Western blot studies showed that full-length protein was produced indicating that L. tarentolae, may be a better expression vector than E. coli.