Research Projects

The rationale of this study is to deliver a vaccine candidate to the antigen-presenting cell (APC), macrophage, by lentiviral antigen delivery system for incitation of strong and robust cell-mediated immunity (CMI) and to understand the host cell-parasite interaction in vitro. Thus, to induce the CMI response, the coding gene for Eimeria tenella IMP-1 (Immune Mapped Protein-1) will be cloned and packed within lentivirus for its subsequent delivery to macrophage and presentation to T-cell. Thereafter, the CMI response against EtIMP-1 will be studied in vitro and in vivo. Earlier studies had shown that inoculation of subunit EtIMP-1 antigen in chicken induced a certain level of humoral immunity (Yin et al., 2013; Kundu et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2021) indicating EtIMP-1 is a potent novel vaccine candidate. Those studies reflected that one of the key factors for the unsuccessful development of E. tenella vaccine is antigen delivery system for induction of protective CMI response. The use of live unattenuated oocyst vaccine in North America proved there is a possibility of development of an effective vaccine, but, due to its high cost of production a pursuit for subunit vaccine continues. The development of a vaccine against poultry coccidiosis in India is necessary as the poultry industry of India suffers an economic loss of 1.14 USD due to this disease alone (Bera et al., 2010). Further, the need for vaccination against Eimeria parasite is added by the remnants of drug residue in meat and eggs as the use of drug is the main strategy of its control in India (Manhas et al., 2023). In natural infection, E. tenella infects the ceacal epithelial cells, macrophage and T-cells of chicken. In naïve infection, macrophage was found to be the most infiltrated cells in the ceacal wall (Trout and Lillehoj, 1993). The immunological phenomenon played against this intracellular parasite in naïve infection is likely through neutralization within macrophage (Soutter et al., 2020) and incitation of T-cell for memory T-cell. Thereafter, during secondary infection, macrophage presents the endogenous parasite’s antigen to T-cell (Min et al., 2013) and largely skewing the TH1 over TH2 subset. This process causes activation of macrophage (M1) and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes against the internalized parasite (Yun et al., 2000; Zaheer et al., 2022). Thus, prior to the in vivo experimental challenge study, it is imperative to understand the host cell-parasite interaction in vitro as the in vivo study could be influenced by several factors yielding unexpected results. Hence, this study will close a gap of knowledge regarding the antigen delivery to APC for understanding the host-parasite interaction in vitro as well as upon challenge infection in vivo for immunoprophylactic study and further vaccine development against poultry coccidiosis.