Salmonella Typhi Vi O-Acetyl Pectin-rEPA Conjugate Vaccine

Typhoid fever remains a common, serious and increasingly difficult to treat disease in developing countries. Control measures, such as safe drinking water, and food, and effective sewage, are not likely to be available soon in many of these countries. In the early 1990's most Salmonella typhi from the Mekong Delta region were resistant to chloramphenicol and ampicillin and treatment required new antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin. Now, resistance of S. typhi has spread to ciprofloxacin. There are three licensed vaccines for typhoid fever. The whole cell parenteral and the oral attenuated vaccines confer only incomplete immunity of limited duration and cannot be incorporated into the routine vaccination of infants. S. typhi capsular polysaccharide (Vi) is safe, easily standardized and only one injection confers about 70% immunity in individuals greater than 5 years of age for at least 3 years. Its immunogenicity is lesser in 2-4 year-olds and it does not elicit protective antibody levels in children less than 2 years-old. Vi does not elicit a booster response at any age (age-related T-cell independent antibody response). The immunogenicity of Vi is improved by covalently binding it to a protein to form a conjugate. Vi conjugates were safe and more immunogenic than Vi in adults, in 5-14 year-olds and in children 2-4 year-olds, and showed 90% efficacy in the 2-5 year olds for 47 months. O-acetyl pectin mimics the antigenic properties of Vi. Although not immunogenic alone, O-acetyl pectin when conjugated induces serum Vi antibodies with booster responses in mice and in guinea pigs albeit at slightly lower levels than Vi conjugates in mice. Double immunodiffusion against mouse anti-Vi revealed antigenic identity between O-acetyl pectin and Vi conjugates. There are advantages to using pectin as the polysaccharide component of conjugate vaccines for typhoid. Pectin is abundant, has no LPS and requires a simple chemical modification to prepare its di-O-acetyl derivative. Our yields of O-acetyl pectin-rEPA were similar to those of Vi-rEPA. Because it may not be reliable to extrapolate data from animals to humans and especially to infants, we propose clinical evaluation of O-acetyl pectin bound to the recombinant protein A of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (rEPA).