Nanoparticle Vaccines Adopting Virus-like Features for Enhanced Immune Potentiation

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

In the last decade, advances in materials engineering have opened up new avenues for Ivyspring International Publisher innovative vaccine designs. In particular, synthetic nanoparticles have been widely adopted for vaccine development [3, 4] . These particles, typically 25 to 200 nm in diameter, have shown effective immune potentiation in vivo, capable of inducing strong humoral and cellular immune responses against antigen targets. Compared to live attenuated viral vaccines, synthetic nanoparticles promise better safety profiles because of their non-replicating nature. They are also readily amenable to different infectious pathogens [3] . From a holistic view, many advantages of nanoparticle vaccines may be attributed to their intrinsic semblance to natural viruses (Fig. 1) . Many viral features, such as nanoscale morphology, repetitive multivalent antigen display and controlled antigen/adjuvant delivery are conducive to immune processing on both physiological and cellular levels. As our immune system has evolved to effectively respond to infectious viral nanoparticles, it should not come as a surprise that nanoformulations adopting virus-like features can be more potent than conventional subunit formulations.