Nanoparticles coated with mycobacterial outer membrane vesicles as vaccine candidate for Tuberculosis
Authors: Edna George, Shalini Chandrashekhar, Avijit Goswami and *Rachit Agarwal
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*Corresponding author
Centre for BioSystems Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, 560012 India
Vaccination is a minimally invasive technique that would allow the immune system to develop protection against a particular disease. Currently, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is the only clinically available vaccine against Tuberculosis (TB) with protection limited to pediatric group. This highlights the urgent need for new vaccine strategies that ensures protection throughout adolescence and adulthood. Hence, this work emphasizes on developing vaccine by synthesizing and coating gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) with mycobacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMV). Synthesized AuNPs were bio-functionalised using outer membrane vesicles isolated from M. smegmatis. Cytokine profiles using THP1 cells showed higher levels of IL 8 was released by cells treated with AuNP-OMV when compared to cells treated with uncoated AuNPs or OMVs alone. Analysis of cell supernatant using ELISA showed modest increase in the levels of IL 6 in cells treated with AuNP-OMV compared to cells treated with bare AuNP or OMV. However, this will be verified with further experiments. Similar results have been replicated in bone marrow derived macrophages that showed increased IL6 and TNFα response. Thus, in vitro studies point towards the efficacy of OMV functionalized AuNP as a potential vaccine candidate.