Inducing Immune Protection Against Trichomonas vaginalis: A Novel Vaccine Approach to Prevent HIV Transmission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is a pandemic that affects all parts of the globe. Current treatments fail to cure disease and for this reason there is significant interest in producing a vaccine to prevent HIV transmission, but clinical trials have proved disappointing. For this reason it is important to consider alternative measures to control incidence and prevalence of the disease. Trichomonas vaginalis is a highly prevalent and under-diagnosed sexually transmitted infection that facilitates transmission of and susceptibility to HIV infection Although current treatment is effective the disease is still poorly controlled and there are concerns about increasing levels of drug resistance Efforts to research disease mechanisms and immune response with consideration to a rational vaccine design approach should be investigated as a potential method to reduce global incidence of T. vaginalis infection. A reliable murine model of T. vaginalis infection has been established with symptoms in female mice mimicking those seen in women (from vaginitis/vulvitis and discharge to asymptomatic but culture-positive for infection). Using this model it has been shown that vaccinating mice (by injection of trichomonad cells with adjuvant) protects the animals from subsequent vaginal infection By studying immune responses in mice, factors that are critical for immunological protection can be elucidated to create a "blueprint" for an effective human vaccine. Herein we provide an overview of the current understanding of T. vaginalis infection and epidemiology, methods of diagnosis and treatment, and implications of animal models for understanding disease mechanisms . We discuss how and why current T. vaginalis treatment protocols fail to control infection incidence with consideration as to how a T. vaginalis vaccine could overcome these obstacles and reduce disease burden. The association between T. vaginalis and HIV is examined and the potential for reducing HIV infection rates by lowering T. vaginalis incidence is elucidated. A vaccine against T. vaginalis would provide long term protection that could be more successful than treatment in controlling the spread of this very common disease. As T. vaginalis infection is a clear risk factor for HIV acquisition, it is our belief that this approach would also be effective in ameliorating HIV incidence and prevalence, especially in areas such as South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where HIV and T. vaginalis are endemic (United Nations, 2009; World Health Organization, 2001). www.intechopen.com
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".