TherVacB Vaccine: MIKAIA Used in Preclinical Immunotoxicity Study

The TherVacB project, led by Helmholtz Zentrum München, received a five-year funding within the Horizon 2020 program. With TherVacB, a therapeutic vaccine to cure Hepatitis B, the project’s aim is to provide a novel and affordable curative treatment for chronic hepatitis B patients:

The mission of TherVacB is to overcome HBV-specific immune tolerance and to restore antiviral B-cell and T-cell responses by therapeutic vaccination to finally cure HBV. 

https://www.thervacb.eu/the-project/

In September 2023, results from a preclinical immunotoxicity study were presented by the project consortium at the 20^th European Congress of Toxicologic Pathology (ESTP23) in Basel, Switzerland. Here is the presented poster: Pathohistological evaluation to exclude immunotoxic effects of the TherVacB vaccine in liver tissue – Results from an immunotoxicity GLP study using a transgenic AAV-HBV mouse model.

ESTP23 Poster

Authors

A. Hoffmann¹, S. Riemschneider¹, K. Klose¹, O. Antoniadou¹, V. Bruns³, M. Kreuz¹, A. Kosinska², F. Thiele², M. Wiegand², U. Protzer², and J. Lehmann¹

• ¹ Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology (IZI)
  Leipzig, Perlickstraße 1, 04103 Leipzig
• ² Institute of Virology, Technical University of Munich, Helmholtz-Zentrum München
  Munich, Trogerstraße 30, 81675 München, Germany
• ³ Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS)
  Erlangen, Am Wolfsmantel 33, 91058 Erlangen, Germany

Batch T-cell quantification with MIKAIA

The digital dataset comprised close to 300 whole-slide images (WSI):

• ~100 WSIs each for quantification of CD3+, CD4+ and CD8a+ T cells
• 2 liver sections per scan
• Zeiss CZI format, 40x objective, scanned with Zeiss AxioScan
• 2.5 TB image data in total

The MIKAIA IHC Cell Detection App was used to detect the liver tissue and number of DAB+ cells. The absolute amount and cells/mm² cell density was stated separately per liver section (2 per scan), utilizing the scan region extracted from the Zeiss CZI format. The analysis was performed in three batch jobs – one per marker. Each batch took ~2 hours to compute. The result is a folder each, that contains

• per slide:
  • MIKAIA annotation overlay file (*.ano)
  • shortcuts to the analyzed files
  • low-resolution (~3000x3000px) PNGs with and without burnt-in markup
  • CSV with quantitative outputs (area in µm² per tissue, # contained DAB+ cells)
• summary CSV file containing all rows from individual per-slide CSV files
• *.cfg file with used MIKAIA App configuration parameters (loadable into MIKAIA)
• *.micbat MIKAIA batch-analysis file for repeating the batch-analysis on demand