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.