Research progress of spotted fever vaccines

GONG Wen-ping; WEN Bo-hai

Abstract：Spotted fever is a highly infectious disease caused by spotted fever group Rickettsiae, and vaccination is still an im-portant way to prevent this disease. The vaccination of inactivated Rickettsia rickettsii can stimulate experimental animals to produce specific humoral and cellular immunity, effectively against lethal infection of R. rickettsii, however, the protective efficiency of this in-activated vaccine in human is not quite satisfactory. Fortunately, some protective antigens of spotted fever group Rickettsiae, such as OmpA, OmpB, YbgF and Adr2, have been recognized as potential candidates for subunit vaccines against rickettsial infection. The vac-cination with a single protective antigen can make animals produce specific humoral and cellular immunity, but cannot induce a com-plete protection against rickettsial infection. The combination of multi-protective antigens or epitope peptides of T/B lymphocyte may be an effective way to develop more effective vaccines against spotted fever.