Biochemical analysis and application of molecular display technology on Candida albicans for diagnosing and preventing candidiasis.

Medical facilities and advances in therapeutics have improved world over in recent times. Concomitant with this, the human population has been growing steadily. However, emerging infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and AIDS, as well as re-emerging infectious diseases such as Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever, have been spreading in recent times. Three major infectious diseases, namely AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, are killing around 8 million people in the world annually. Although drugs effective against these infectious diseases are available at present, drastic therapeutics have not been developed yet. In addition, vaccines against these diseases often cannot prevent infections, because pathogenic viruses or bacteria evade the immune system of the host. Many diseases and emerging infections of pathogenic bacteria cannot be controlled by conventional pharmaceutics. These pathogens secrete regulatory factors. When the produced regulatory factor attains a certain level, an active factor is then produced by the pathogen to destroy the host. Considering these phenomena, we thought investigating characteristic regulatory or active factors will pave the way for developing novel vaccines or diagnostic drugs. Therefore, candidiasis was selected as a model, and application of the secretory protease of Candida albicans was examined for the development of novel drugs. Screening of novel candidates of antigens of C. albicans and vaccine development are also underway. In this paper, our strategy of platform technology against various infectious diseases are introduced.