Brucellosis is a neglected zoonotic disease that afflicts humans and farm animals globally and is an endemic in many tropical regions. In humans, brucellosis is transmitted via inadvertent consumption of infected dairy products and direct contact with diseased animals, and frequently afflicts veterinarians and animal handlers. Currently available vaccines for animals are based on live attenuated strains that carry the risk of infection and newer more effective vaccines are required, also from the safety point of view. Our lab is working towards the design and development of vaccines for brucellosis towards protection of animals and humans by making use of antigenic cellular components. 

Vaccine adjuvants is another area in which our lab is extensively involved. There are very few approved vaccine adjuvants and therefore, and urgent need to develop safe and effective vaccine adjuvants. The biocompatibility of lipidic nanocarriers, their ability to offer prolonged release of antigen and immunostimulant to the immune system, their nanoscale dimensions render them ideal for vaccine delivery. We are exploring NLCs developed in our lab for vaccine adjuvant activity. We have evaluated the vaccine adjuvant activity of the NLCs administered intraperitoneally by testing with protein antigen. Further work is underway to evaluate the vaccine adjuvant activity along with immunostimulant molecules.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics currently accessible for identification of brucellosis use time consuming culture methods as gold standard and additionally suffer from non-specificity due to cross reactivity, lack of accessibility to remote areas, requirement of skilled personnel and expensive equipment for analysis.  Point of care immunoassays are swift as they can effectively scan various samples in a comparatively less duration of time, are sensitive, specific and offer a great advantage in accurate and fast diagnosis of infectious diseases. Using this technology as a platform, we have fabricated silica based nanosensors capable of specifically detecting anti-brucella antibodies in serological and non-serological samples of afflicted patients. We have successfully designed point of care immunochromatographic testing strips that can detect anti-brucella antibodies in milk samples from farm animals with high sensitivity and specificity.