[Conjugate vaccines against bacterial infections: typhoid fever]

Capsular polysaccharides have been studied as possible vaccines against infectious diseases. However, they are capable to induce only short-run protection because of their T-independent properties and they would not be protective against infection in high-risk populations. The alternative to face this problem is to develop methods to join covalently the polysaccharide and proteins to both increase the immunogenicity of and to confer the property of T-dependence to this antigen. In order to obtain a conjugate vaccine against typhoid fever, in our laboratory we have tried to synthesize a conjugate immunogen between the Vi antigen and porins from Salmonella typhi.