Mentor: Rock Mancini, Ph.D.

Adjuvants and LPS

An adjuvant is a substance added to a vaccine to enhance the immune response to the antigen. Adjuvanted vaccines are more likely to cause inflammatory side effects such as fever, headache, and redness and swelling at the injection site.(1)

Lipopolysaccharides (LPS) are glycolipids that can be found on the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria

LPS is a toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) agonist and potent immunostimulant; however, it is currently limited in its use in vaccines due to its reactogenicity, or ability to cause inflammatory side effects.

NIPAM

Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (NIPAM) is a polymer that changes conformation from a coiled state to a globular state above its lower critical solution temperature (LCST) near human body temperature(2)

It has been copolymerized and examined as a drug delivery system(3). It has also been used before to sequester LPS from an aqueous solution, though whether or not LPS’s incorporation into the polymer phase attenuates its immunogenicity remains untested(4)

As a Thermoresponsive Regulator, NIPAM’s thermoresponsive properties could be used to create a negative feedback system to reduce fever.

The Mancini lab has previously created a NIPAM-adjuvant copolymer for this purpose(5)

This project examines if NIPAM can reduce the immunogenicity of LPS above its LCST by incorporating it into its polymer phase for the purpose of creating a thermoresponsive vaccine adjuvant system.

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