Recent Advances in Nanovaccines Using Biomimetic Immunomodulatory Materials

Vijayan, Veena; Mohapatra, Adityanarayan; Uthaman, Saji; Park, In-Kyu

shell" structure, in which the NP forms the hydrophobic core, and a thin layer of plasma membrane coating acts as the shell. In this NP, various cell membranes are used to cloak synthetic NPs through a top-down fabrication method, thus preserving the physicochemical properties of the core synthetic NPs, while maintaining the cellular composition on its hydrophilic membrane shell [41] . Hu et al. [42] reported the first membrane-coated NPs where red blood cell (RBC) membranes were coated over a polymeric NP through extrusion [42] . Many types of membranes from different sources, such as RBCs [41] [42] [43] , leukocytes [44] [45] [46] , cytotoxic T-cells [47] , NK cells [48] , platelets [49] , macrophages [44, 50] , and cancer cells [51, 52] , have been used in the preparation of membrane-coated NPs. Another type of biomimetic nanovaccine can be self-assembling proteins, which are known to have high symmetry and stability, and can be structurally organized into particles of sizes nm [53, 54] . These self-assembling protein NPs play diverse physiological roles, and are selected as vaccine carriers owing to their ability to self-assemble and deploy into a definite structure that mimics a natural microbe architecture [55] . Virus-like particles (VLPs) are another type of biomimetic nanovaccine that contain noninfectious subsets of virus that lack genetic materials; they assemble without containing any viral RNA [56] .