Giulia Lapini

Università degli Studi di Siena | UNISI · Department of Molecular & Developmental Medicine

Introduction The haemagglutination inhibition assay (HAI) and the virus microneutralisation assay (MN) are long-established methods for quantifying antibodies against influenza viruses. Despite their widespread use, both assays require standardisation to improve inter-laboratory agreement in testing. The FLUCOP consortium aims to develop a toolbox...

Yellow fever, a mosquito-borne flavivirus infection, is an important public health problem in Africa and Latin America. A Yellow Fever vaccine (YFV) was developed and tested in a study in India. This was a Phase I, open-label, randomized, controlled study where healthy adults received SII YFV intramuscularly (SII YFV IM), SII YFV subcutaneously (SI...

Background Yellow fever, a mosquito borne flavivirus infection, is an important public health problem in Africa and Latin America. A Yellow Fever vaccine (YFV) was developed and tested in a study in India. Methods This was a Phase I, open-label, randomized, controlled study where healthy adults received SII YFV intramuscularly (SII YFV IM), SII YF...

Background Children are an important target group for influenza vaccination, but few studies have prospectively evaluated influenza vaccine efficacy (VE) in children under 3 years of age. This was a randomized Phase III trial to assess the efficacy, immunogenicity, and safety of an inactivated quadrivalent influenza vaccine (QIV) in young children...

The neutralization assays are considered the gold-standard being capable of evaluating and detecting, functional antibodies. To date, many different protocols exist for micro-neutralization (MN) assay which varies in several steps: cell number and seeding conditions, virus amount used in the infection step, virus-serum-cells incubation time and rea...

SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is causing high morbidity and mortality burden worldwide with unprecedented strain on health care systems. To investigate the time course of the antibody response in relation to the outcome we performed a study in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. As comparison we also investigated the time course of the antibody response in SARS-...

SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is causing high morbidity and mortality burden worldwide with unprecedented strain on health care systems. To elucidate the mechanism of infection, protection, or rapid evolution until fatal outcome of the disease we performed a study in hospitalized COVID-19 patients to investigate the time course of the antibody response in re...

A newly identified coronavirus, named SARS-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019 in Hubei Province, China, and quickly spread throughout the world; so far, it has caused more than 49.7 million cases of disease and 1,2 million deaths. The diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection is currently based on the detection of viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swabs by means of...

Due to the global spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is an urgent need for reliable high-throughput serological assays in order to evaluate the immunological responses against SARS-COV-2 virus and to enable population screening, as well as vaccines and drug’s efficacy testing. Several serological assay...

A newly identified coronavirus, named SARS-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019 in Hubei Province, China, and quickly spread throughout the world; so far, it has caused more than 18 million cases of disease and 700,000 deaths. The diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection is currently based on the detection of viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swabs by means of molec...

Objectives: To analyze the immunogenicity and safety of inactivated subunit quadrivalent influenza vaccine (QIV) versus trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV) in children and adolescents 3-17 years of age. Methods: In this phase III, multicenter, double-blind study, 1200 subjects were randomized to receive QIV (n = 402), or TIV with the B-strain of t...

Background: Formulation of neuraminidase (NA) within influenza vaccines is gaining importance in light of recent human studies. The enzyme-linked lectin assay (ELLA) is considered a reliable assay to evaluate human anti-NA antibodies. Objectives: To overcome interference by hemagglutinin (HA)-specific antibodies and detect neuraminidase inhibito...

Influenza vaccination remains the best strategy for the prevention of influenza virus-related disease and reduction of disease severity and mortality. However, there is large individual variation in influenza vaccine responses. In this study, we investigated the effects of gender, age, underlying diseases, and medication on vaccine responses in 1,8...

A high content peptide microarray containing the entire Influenza A virus (A/California/08/2009(H1N1)) proteome and hemagglutinin proteins from 12 other influenza A subtypes, including the hemagglutinin from the (A/South Carolina/1/1918(H1N1)) strain, was used to gauge serum IgG epitope signatures prior to and after pandemrix vaccination/ or H1N1 i...

The human population is constantly exposed to multiple influenza A subtypes due to zoonotic spill over and rapid viral evolution driven by intrinsic error-prone replication and immunological pressure. In this context, antibody responses directed against the HA protein are of importance since they have been shown to correlate with protective immunit...

Background Previous exposures to flu and subsequent immune responses may impact on 2009/2010 pandemic flu vaccine responses and clinical symptoms upon infection with the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza strain. Qualitative and quantitative differences in humoral and cellular immune responses associated with the flu vaccination in 2009/2010 (pandemic H1...

We investigated the protective efficacy of two intranasal chitosan (CSN and TM-CSN) adjuvanted H5N1 Influenza vaccines against highly pathogenic avian Influenza (HPAI) intratracheal and intranasal challenge in a ferret model. Six groups of 6 ferrets were intranasally vaccinated twice, 21 days apart, with either placebo, antigen alone, CSN adjuvante...

Egg-derived viruses are the only available seed material for influenza vaccine production. Vaccine manufacturing is done in embryonated chicken eggs, MDCK or Vero cells. In order to contribute to efficient production of influenza vaccines, we investigate whether the quality of inactivated vaccines is influenced by the propagation substrate. We demo...

Please cite this paper as: Svindland et al. (2012) A study of Chitosan and c‐di‐GMP as mucosal adjuvants for intranasal influenza H5N1 vaccine. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 10.1111/irv.12056000(000), 000–000. Background Highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 virus remains a potential pandemic threat, and it is essential to continue va...

In the 20th century, three influenza pandemics killed approximately 100 million people. The traditional method of influenza vaccine manufacturing is based on using chicken eggs. However, the necessity of the availability of millions of fertile eggs in the event of a pandemic has led research to focus on the development of cell culture-derived vacci...

(DOCX)

(DOCX)

The recent swine H1N1 influenza outbreak demonstrated that egg-based vaccine manufacturing has an Achille's heel: its inability to provide a large number of doses quickly. Using a novel manufacturing platform based on transient expression of influenza surface glycoproteins in Nicotiana benthamiana, we have recently demonstrated that a candidate Vir...

To assess in Italy the pre-pandemic susceptibility of the general population to the 2009 A/H1N1v influenza virus, 587 serum samples collected in 2004 were analyzed using haemagglutination-inhibition (HI), single-radial-haemolysis (SRH) and microneutralisation (MN) assays. Serum samples were stratified by age group, gender, and geographic area. Over...

Pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine antigens are currently being manufactured. The MF(59) adjuvant has an established safety profile in humans and a proven ability to increase responses to some influenza vaccines in humans. To inform initial decisions on the use of these vaccine components to protect human populations, we have immunized mice with MF(59...