“Research on Caries Vaccine” by Professor Taku Fujiwara of the Department of Pediatric Dentistry, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and others was published in Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, and Tomonori Hoshino received the Japanese Society of Ped

The research group of Tomonori Hoshino, lecturer at Nagasaki University Hospital, Professor Taku Fujiwara, Assistant Professor Kan Saito, medical staff Yoshio Kondo of the Department of Pediatric Dentistry, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and Professor Shigetada Kawabata, Associate Professor Yutaka Terao and Associate Professor Nobuo Okahashi of the Graduate School of Dentistry Osaka University, asking why a vaccine for caries has not been realized despite the many reports there have been about the development of one, newly analyzed the antigenicity of glucosyltransferase B, one of the pathogenic factors of Streptococcus mutans causing caries.
Their results showed that the catalytic domains and glucan binding domains which have been used thus far as targets for vaccine do not have very high antigenicity in terms of hydrophilicity, due to conformational problems or the amino acid composition ratio, but the antigenicity of a polymorphic region on the N-terminal which is specific to the species but whose function has not been identified.
Since an antibody capable of effectively suppressing the enzyme activity of glucosyltransferase B can be derived by making this region the target of a caries vaccine, the possibility of developing an effective anti-caries vaccine has increased.

An article about this research was published in the September 2011 issue of Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, and Tomonori Hoshino received the 2010 Lion Award academic prize at the 50th Conference of the Japanese Society of Pediatric Dentistry held in Tokyo in May 2012.
An article about this award appeared in the Nagasaki Shimbun on July 4, 2012.

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