Nanoparticle-Based Peptide Vaccines

The use of peptide antigens for vaccination, compared with traditional vaccines, has advantages such as purity and low risk of adverse effects and disadvantages such as weak immunogenicity and necessitates administration with an adjuvant. To benefit from these advantages and at the same time overcome the disadvantages, a wide variety of nanoparticles are being actively studied for the development of peptide-based vaccines, in which the antigen either is loaded on the particle surface or is present within the particle. In this chapter, we will provide a brief overview of synthetic peptide–based vaccine research, with special attention on multiple antigen-presenting peptide vaccines. Further, we will introduce the current approaches for the development of nanoparticle-based peptide vaccines, which use well-characterized synthetic peptide antigens with facile chemical modifications (eg, attachment of lipid chain(s) or self-assembling peptide sequences). These modifications can be employed to induce peptide self-assembly into nanoparticles, which present multiple copies of peptide antigens on their surface.