Nanoparticle Vaccines Adopting Virus-like Features for Enhanced Immune Potentiation

Chattopadhyay, Saborni; Chen, Jui-Yi; Chen, Hui-Wen; Hu, Che-Ming Jack

As gold is chemically inert, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have been studied extensively for biomedical applications. AuNPs can be synthesized reproducibly with a high level of precision, offering an ultrastable metallic core for further modifications. Capable of being modified with a plethora of chemical functional groups such as thiols, phosphines, amines, and by extension protein antigens, AuNPs have been used broadly in many vaccination studies. A multitude of biomolecules, ranging from toxin, viral antigens, bacterial antigens, parasite proteins, and tumor antigens, have been coupled with gold nanoparticles to enhance immune responses. AuNPs vaccines have been explored in clinical trials for hepatitis B and malaria vaccinations [96, 97] , and they also allow anchoring of nucleic acids for DNA vaccine applications [98] . AuNPs have been modified with different adjuvants as well, such as chitosan [99] and CpG oligodeoxynucleotides [100, 101] , and many alternative surface functionalization strategies have been explored to further enhance immune potentiation. AuNPs surface modified with cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), poly(diallydimethylammonium chloride) (PDDAC), and polyethyleneimine (PEI), have been used as a DNA vaccine adjuvant for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) [102] . These modifications were found to further boost the adjuvanticity of the AuNP carrier.