Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology
Wendy Brown
Searching for Immunity to
Vector-borne Diseases
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Dr. Brown is recognized nationally and internationally for her research on T lymphocyte responses to tick-borne pathogens of cattle and for the use of T lymphocytes to identify promising vaccine antigens. T lymphocytes orchestrate the adaptive immune response in vertebrates, endowing animals and humans with immunological memory to thwart infectious agents that have been previously encountered. T lymphocytes are critically important in assisting B lymphocytes in neutralizing pathogens, killing microbes, and for directly killing pathogen-infected cells.
The two tick-transmitted pathogens Dr. Brown studies most closely are Babesia bovis, a protozoan parasite, and Anaplasma marginale, a gram-negative bacterium. Both organisms are obligate intracellular pathogens that invade and replicate within bovine erythrocytes and cause anemia and persistent infection. Dr. Brown has focused her research on characterizing CD4+ T lymphocyte responses in cattle that are protected from disease upon infection with either Babesia bovis or Anaplasma marginale. For B. bovis, protection can be generated by infection and treatment with babesiacidal drugs and for A. marginale protection can be effected by immunization with purified outer membranes. These animal models have been used to define the correlates of protective immunity, to understand how the pathogen regulates and evades the immune response, and to identify fractionated pathogen protein antigens and their epitopes recognized by CD4+ T cells and antibodies of immune cattle that could be useful vaccine antigens. Because serologically immunodominant surface antigens have not historically provided protection against challenge, Dr. Brown ’s research has focused on identifying subdominant protein antigens, which elicit relatively weaker antibody responses. The availability of completed genome sequences of these pathogens has permitted a sophisticated and comprehensive genomic and proteomic approach to discover novel antigens that, importantly, are recognized by immune effectors. Furthermore, the high degree of sequence similarity of the newly discovered, immunogenic proteins with homologous proteins in related pathogens of humans indicates that the novel antigens identified for cattle pathogens may be useful for developing vaccines against human pathogens as well.
Contact Information
Wendy C. Brown, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology
Washington State University
P.O. Box 647040
Pullman, WA 99164-7040
Telephone: 509-335-6067
E-mail: wbrown@vetmed.wsu |
