A research team at CNU has succeeded in developing an immune booster that reaches a level close to the development of a new drug.

A research team led by Professor Lee Jun-haeng (Department of Medicine) and Lee Si-eun (Department of Dentistry) at CNU has developed a De-Immune Flagellin Immune Enhancer, opening possibilities to create a new medication through immunoinformatic analysis and immunological validation studies using experimental animal models. The results of this study were published in npj Vaccines, a leading journal in the field of vaccines, on September 13.

Flagellin is a protein constituting flagella, a structure that determines bacterial motility, and is known to be a Toll-Like Receptor-5 (TLR-5) ligand.

The research team developed a deimmunized flagellin variant (dFlaB) that removed the minimum major epitope that can form antibodies to flagellin, a proteinaceous immune enhancer, and identified its biochemical properties.

In addition, when used as a vaccine adjuvant, it was demonstrated through a mouse flu vaccine model that while maintaining the efficacy of an adjuvant that amplified the antigen-specific immune response administered at the same time, antibodies to flagellin itself were not generated.

Researchers have secured the original technology for a flagellin immune enhancer with strong immune modulating ability and have been focusing on research for new drug development using a flagellin immune enhancer for the past several years.

In this study, CNU master's and doctoral student Khim Koemchhoy and Bang Yong-jun participated as co-first authors, and the completion was improved through collaborative research with Professor Choi Yoon-ju (Department of Medicine).

Professor Lee said, "This study is considered to have presented a platform that can be applied to various immunotherapy fields such as cancer immunotherapy and an Alzheimer's vaccine, as well as infectious disease-prevention vaccines."