Review: Unravelling the role of DNA sensing in alum adjuvant activity

No abstract available

Nanoalum adjuvanted vaccines: small details make a big difference

Purified vaccine antigens offer important safety and reactogenicity advantages compared with live attenuated or whole killed virus and bacterial vaccines. However, they require the addition of adjuvants to induce the magnitude, duration and quality of immune response required to achieve protective immunity. Aluminium salts have been used as adjuvants in vaccines for almost a century. In the literature, they are often referred to as aluminium-based adjuvants (ABAs), or aluminium salt-containing adjuvants or more simply “alum”. All these terms are used to group aluminium suspensions that are very different in terms of atomic composition, size, and shape. They differ also in stability, antigen-adsorption, and antigen-release kinetics. Critically, these parameters also have a profound effect on the character and magnitude of the immune response elicited. Recent findings suggest that, by reducing the size of aluminium from micro to nanometers, a more effective adjuvant is obtained, together with the ability to sterile filter the vaccine product. However, the behaviour of aluminium nanoparticles in vaccine formulations is different from microparticles, requiring specific formulation strategies, as well as a more detailed understanding of how formulation influences the immune response generated. Here we review the current state of art of aluminium nanoparticles as adjuvants, with a focus on their immunobiology, preparation methods, formulation optimisation and stabilisation

Giustizia e letteratura I

The book explores and links different cultures, disciplines and perspectives, with a much more original and broad approach to the relations between \u201cJustice\u201d and \u201cLiterature\u201d than more traditional works focused on \u201cLaw\u201d and \u201cLiterature\u201d topics. The many contributions from writers, literary critics, and criminal law scholars, build a complex and interdisciplinary path through primary works of Italian and international literature, with the aim of prompting readers\u2019 reflections about core issues related to law, crime, and responsibility. Through the analysis of masterpieces of literature, theatre, music and cinema, this book aims at stimulating a dialogue and debate, as well as the critical ability and the sense of justice, amongst both law professionals and citizens at large. Literature and the other narrative arts are presented here as the key to approach long-standing questions about (amongst other) juridical formalism and equity; law and ethics; responsibility, culpability and forgiveness; rules, legality and how people relate to these concepts; the value of narration as a strategy to resist injustice and to seek justice; and so on. Through this quest for justice in literature and arts, the book proposes a wider cultural and research project which defies traditional formalistic and retributive approaches to criminal law, in order to open new perspectives for restorative and reintegrative strategies