VALIDATE Seminar: BCG & COVID - A century-old vaccine in a novel proposal for heterologous recall dose formulation
Recently, there have been strong indications that it is possible to increase the immune response by a second dose of BCG vaccine. Thus, the BCG vaccine re-emerged to be considered based on a significant protective effect of BCG revaccination against TB and supporting its beneficial non-specific, agnostic, or heterologous effects. The latter has also been reported to reduce neonatal sepsis, respiratory tract infections, and all-cause infant mortality. In fact, the past pandemic has stimulated us and other investigators to scrutinize the effect of the BCG vaccine as a strategy to reduce severe COVID-19. Using both wild-type and variant virus sequences, we have gone through several preliminary in silico screenings, such as epitope toxicity, immunogenicity, antigenicity, MHC-I profiles, and positive response employing IFN-g production. Various BCG-vaccination schedules have been reevaluated in recent research clinical trials due to high numbers of TB cases and deaths, but the community still waiting for a convincing response about novel BCG-formulations and BCG-vaccination protocols.
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About the Speakers
Prof Paulo Antas is a Professor of Biology and a Senior Researcher. He completed both MSc and PhD at FIOCRUZ, Brazil, He is also working as Editorial Board member and Reviewer for scientific journals. He wrote Book chapters and e-books. In addition, he has been working on innate immune responses against Tuberculosis (TB) in individuals naturally exposed to Mycobacterium tuberculosis at FIOCRUZ since 2007. Since those years, he has been working in a group that develops research on the field of clinical immune response of vaccinations against human TB, especially in the cellular immunology area. Most of his scientific time is currently dedicated to studying several aspects of in vitro immune response before and after BCG vaccination, such as the involvement of inflammatory cytokines, and T cells on immune response against mycobacteria. As a result, he has accumulated significant data and thus experience in this field. In addition, he spent time working on projects related to biomarker detection in patients with extrapulmonary TB, particularly the pleuritic form, comparing them to those responses among persons with either pulmonary form or other pleural diseases. This work in Pleural TB has provided him with yet another laboratory skill set that has been complementing the skills he has gained in TB immunology thus far.
In 2016, Prof Thales A Campelo graduated in Pharmacy from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). Additionally, he obtained a specialization in Clinical Microbiology in 2021 and a Master of Science degree in Pathology in 2018, both from Unichristus College in Ceará state (CE). Prof. Campelo's expertise is centered in the field of Microbiology, with a primary focus on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, M. leprae, HPV, and molecular diagnosis of other infectious diseases, utilizing Multiplexed PCR, Nested PCR, and Real-Time PCR approaches. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, he worked as a Clinical Analyst Pharmacist, conducting extensive qPCR tests for COVID-19 at FIOTEC/FIOCRUZ in CE. Furthermore, in 2023, Prof. Campelo had the opportunity to supervise Clinical Microbiology, Microbiological Control, and Clinical Analysis Internships in the Pharmacy program at the University of Fortaleza (UNIFOR). Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Pathology at UFC, conducting fundamental research on Sars-CoV-2 peptides intended for use in understanding the human immune response to Sars-CoV-2. In this research project, Prof. Campelo has acquired expertise in bioinformatics during the development of epitope predictions targeted towards both TCD8 and TCD4 immune responses.
