N-Propionylation
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Serogroup B
Neisseria meningitidis
remains a major world health problem and currently there is no fully efficacious vaccine available. The poor immunogenicity of the group B meningococcal polysaccharide both in adults and infants prevents the formulation of a comprehensive polysaccharide-based vaccine (
1
). Although, as discussed in Chapter 4 , conjugation technology can overcome the limitation of the poor immunogenicity of most capsular polysaccharides, the serogroup B meningococcal polysaccharide when conjugated to a protein carrier still failed to give a significant immune response (
2
,
3
). This phenomenon is probably attributed to the molecular mimicry between the polysaccharide and human-tissue antigens. As shown in Fig. 1 , the serogroup B polysaccharide is a homopolymer of α(2–8)-linked sialic-acid residues (
4
) and similar structures have also been identified in the humantissue antigens, from short trimeric fragments found in mammalian gangliosides (
5
) to long decameric fragments observed in the glycoproteins of neural-cell adhesion molecules (N-CAMs) (
6
).
Fig. 1.
Chemical structure of GBMP.
