Discovering Josue by Gloria Giovanna Discovering Josue is the heart-wrenching true story of an eighteen-year-old Mexican boy who was in severe pain and dying all alone of cancer. He had been in the hospital for over six months without a visitor or family. It was back in the year 2000 during the presidential elections. Most of the immigrants coming over the border didn’t mumble a word of English. When Gloria’s next client strolled into her beauty salon, he was an oncologist who had informed her about his patient Josue. As tears streamed down his face, he conveyed that there was nothing more they could do for him. “We don’t even know if he has any family. The only way we can converse with him is through the cleaning lady, Isabel. I know you can communicate in Spanish. Can you go visit him, Gloria?” After my first step of involvement, American, as well as Latino, communities congregated as their heart went out for the boy. We were no longer a race divided, we were united with God. All the Hispanics want to do is have work and make a better life for their family. This intensely emotional endeavor altered my life forever!
Who is this man? Josué is locked up in Shalem State Prison, a maximum-security institution. He had never attracted much attention to himself before, and was content to just "do his own time." But then something happened to him; and now, he's on a mission to share it. "Man, I ain't never heard nothin' like this guy!" exclaims Jamal, one of the twelve prisoners that Josué has appointed to be his "Reps," and to share the Word about his message with the other prisoners. Josué freely gives of himself, praying for the healing of the many troubled people who flock to him, and telling them stories about the "New Order" that God is going to establish very soon. But the authority figures in the prison can't stand this arrogant challenger to their own power. They try to embarrass Josué publicly, and fail utterly. But then, when one of Josué's own followers offers to turn on him, betrayal and greed lead to a violent climax. Does this story sound familiar? Then come and read an all too well-known tale told in a fresh, exciting way and maybe see some things in the story that you'd never noticed before.
Who is this man? Josu is locked up in Shalem State Prison, a maximum-security institution. He had never attracted much attention to himself before, and was content to just "do his own time." But then something happened to him; and now, he's on a mission to share it. "Man, I ain't never heard nothin' like this guy!" exclaims Jamal, one of the twelve prisoners that Josu has appointed to be his "Reps," and to share the Word about his message with the other prisoners. Josu freely gives of himself, praying for the healing of the many troubled people who flock to him, and telling them stories about the "New Order" that God is going to establish very soon. But the authority figures in the prison can't stand this arrogant challenger to their own power. They try to embarrass Josu publicly, and fail utterly. But then, when one of Josu's own followers offers to turn on him, betrayal and greed lead to a violent climax. Does this story sound familiar? Then come and read an all too well-known tale told in a fresh, exciting way and maybe see some things in the story that you'd never noticed before.
Since variolation, conventional approaches to vaccine development are based on live-attenuated, inactivated or purified pathogen-derived components. However, effective vaccines against global health threats such as HIV, parasite infections and tumors are difficult to achieve. On the other hand, synthetic vaccines based on immunogenic epitopes offer advantages over traditional vaccines since they are chemically defined antigens free from deleterious effects. Additionally, in contrast to live-attenuated vaccines, they do not revert to virulence in immunocompromised subjects, and different from genetic vaccines, they do not involve ethical questions. Traditional vaccines contain PAMPs and induce strong immune responses, while recombinant vaccines are less potent. In spite of the immunogenic weakness previously attributed to epitope-based vaccines a synthetic vaccine containing a 17 amino acid-epitope of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa Type IV pilus exceeded the protective potential of its cognate protein composed of 115 amino acids. Therefore, the efficacy yield of a synthetic vaccine can be potentiated by using the proper combination of target epitopes. Recent advances in adjuvant development, immunogen platforms for DNA vaccines and viral vectors also contributed to optimize immunogenicity. Another constraint to the use of epitope vaccines was their restriction to some MHC or HLA phenotypes. However, epitopes containing 20 or less amino acids of Plasmodium falciparum and Leishmania donovani bind to multiple HLA-DR and MHC receptors. Thus synthetic epitope vaccines may better meet the requirements of the regulatory agencies since they have lower costs and are easier to produce. The classical experimental approach for the development of an epitope-based vaccine involves the use of recombinant domains or overlapping 15-mer peptides spanning the full length of the target antigen, and the analysis of the induced antibody and/or T cell immune responses in vitro or in vivo. On the other hand, in silico tools can select peptides that are more likely to contain epitopes, reducing the number of sequence candidates. T cell epitope prediction dates back to 1980s, when the first algorithm was developed based on the identification of amphipathic helical regions on protein antigens. Since then, new methods based on MHC peptide-binding motifs or MHC-binding properties have been developed. The recent reverse vaccinology concept uses high-throughput genome sequencing and bioinformatics tools to identify potential targets of immune responses. The feasibility of this approach was shown for the first time in the design of a vaccine against Neisseria meningitides that is now in phase III clinical trials. In addition, different computational tools allow the determination of crucial gene(s) through comparative analyses between different pathogenic strains Alternatively, carbohydrates have been considered as key targets in developing safe and effective vaccines to combat cancer, bacterial and viral infections. Tumor associated carbohydrate antigens can be coupled covalently to protein carriers to target MHC receptors and improve immunogenicity and have reached already pre-clinical and clinical studies. In light of the recent availability of genomic tools, we believe that in the near future an increasing number of vaccine candidates, composed of defined epitopes, will be available for synthetic vaccines showing improved protection.
