Poster Presentation HUPO 2019 - 18th Human Proteome Organization World Congress

Proteomics for vaccine discovery: development of two potential whole protein vaccines with efficacy against Pseudomonas aeruginosa (#622)

William Klare 1 , Paula Niewold 2 , Claudio Counoupas 2 , Jamie Triccas 2 , Stuart Cordwell 1 3 4
  1. School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  2. Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  3. Discipline of Pathology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  4. Sydney Mass Spectrometry, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

One of the biggest challenges to quality of life for an individual with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is the high rate of incidence of infection with the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Infections are typically lifelong, causing significant morbidity and mortality, and lead to high rates of divergent within-host evolution, often resulting in the presence of multiple infection phenotypes that are multidrug resistant. This renders traditional therapies and interventions ineffective, with no efficacious vaccine available to date. We profiled within-host adaptation by investigating a pair of isogenic clonal epidemic isolates (AES-1R and AES-1M), isolated from the same patient 11 years apart. Using an integrated multi-omic strategy, we investigated cellular differences by parallel proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics when grown in an artificial sputum-like medium that reflects the physiology of the CF lung. This near-complete cellular characterisation was followed by time-resolved proteomics within the same media to identify proteins crucial to initiation of infection as possible vaccine candidates. Candidate selection was further refined with the aid of the comparative integrated multi-omics data, known recognition by human sera, in vivo expression and comprehensive bioinformatic characterisation. Three proteins were identified, synthesised as peptides, and subsequently screened for protection against infection, as well as mechanisms of immunogenicity via ELISA and flow cytometry. We show high levels of efficacy (99.9% reduction) for two out of three protein vaccines against P. aeruginosa in a mouse infection model. Presented is a workflow for identification and optimisation of peptide vaccine candidates that is scalable, effective and widely applicable to other culturable bacterial species.