Adjuvants are widely used to enhance the effects of vaccines against pathogen infections. Interestingly, different adjuvants and vaccination routes usually induce dissimilar immune responses, and can even have completely opposite effects. The mechanism remains unclear. In this study, urease B subunit (UreB), an antigen of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) that can induce protective immune responses, was used as a model to vaccinate mice. We investigated the effects of different adjuvants and routes on consequent T cell epitope-specific targeting and protection against H. pylori infection. Comparison of the protective effects of UreB, administered either subcutaneously (sc) or intranasally (in), with the adjuvants AddaVax (sc), Complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA; sc), or CpG oligonucleotide (CpG; sc or in), indicated that only CFA (sc) and CpG (in) were protective. Protective vaccines induced T cells targeting epitopes that differed from that targeted by control vaccination. Subsequent peptide vaccination demonstrated that only two of the identified epitopes were protective: UreB373-385 and UreB317-329. Overall, we found that both adjuvant and vaccination route affected the T cell response repertoire to antigen epitopes. The data obtained in this study contribute to improved characterization of the relationship between adjuvants, routes of vaccination, and epitope-specific T cell response repertoires.
Keywords: adjuvants; epitopes; immunodominant; protection; vaccine.