RATIONAL APPROACHES TO IMMUNE REGULATION

Our studies are mainly focused on developing strategies of immune regu lation. In the case of infectious and neoplastic disease, our approach is to upregulate cell-mediated immunity to viral of tumor antigens us ing an intracellular bacterium as a vector for targeting these antigen s to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I and class II p athways of antigen processing, in addition to exploiting the adjuvant properties of the vector to stimulate innate immunity, In the area of autoimmunity, we are attempting to downregulate the immune response by specific immune intervention directed against autoreactive T cells, I n these studies we use murine models for multiple sclerosis, Our appro ach is to use both rationally designed T cell receptor (TCR) peptide a nalogs and recombinant viral vectors that express TCR components to re gulate the disease.