Previous studies on vaccine development against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus reported that application of the inactivated vaccines for FMD virus is not completely effective. Novel vaccinations based on immune-dominant epitopes showed they induced immune responses. In addition, for better and safer immunization, access to of efficient adjuvants against FMD virus seems to be critical. In this study, we produced epitope recombinant vaccines from the VP1 protein of the FMD virus for serotype O of Iran that conjugated with Fc Immunoglobulin (FcIgG) and Interleukin-2 (IL-2). Multiple-epitope constructs included Polytope, Polytope-IL2-FcIgG, Polytope-IL2, Polytope-FcIgG that cloned and expressed in E. coli BL21 (DE3). To evaluate whether these epitope recombinant vaccines induce immune responses, BALB/c mice were injected with the epitope recombinant vaccines and their immune responses were compared with a negative control group. The humoral and cellular immune responses were measured by ELISA. The results showed there were significant differences between the negative control group and other immunized mice with recombinant epitope proteins (p < 0.05). The results of total IgG, IgG1, IgG2a levels and secretion of IFN-γ, IL-4 and IL-10 revealed that immune responses were enhanced when the epitope recombinant vaccine of FMD virus coupled with IL-2 and FcIgG. Observations indicated that the epitope recombinant plasmid of the VP1 protein co-expressed with IL-2 and FcIgG was effective in inducing an enhanced immune response. Therefore, IL-2 and FcIgG could be recommended as a potential adjuvant for epitope recombinant vaccine of the VP1 protein from FMD virus.
