Obesity generated by High Fat Diet & Vaccine Efficacy

            BALB/c mice are often used for testing immunogenicity due to its stronger humoral response when compared with C57BL/6. The latter, on the other hand, is usually used for research related to diet-induced obesity. Also, obese animals tend to respond poorly to split or inactivated virus. Combining these known usage and facts about C57BL/6, we took a novel step in testing universal vaccine on these mice in order to figure out how to overcome limits on vaccination the obesity imposes on.

            As prime-boost immunization is administering vaccine twice to increase antibody and T cell immunogenicity remarkably, we first tested out our hypothesis via checking IgG responsivity with prime and boost to compare the efficacy. We divided mice into four groups; lean vaccinated, obese vaccinated, lean naïve and obese naïve. In order to measure immune response, we utilized antigenicity binding ELISA, then analyzed the data using PRISM. We could confirm our expectation that 1. boost provides more protection than just prime immunization, and 2. obese mice develop less immunogenicity compared to lean mice. Therefore, our future direction is to try out adjuvant or find a way to change microenvironment of obese mice such as using novel reagent(s).