Peptides have opened up a whole new horizon in the field of therapeutics. Due to the various benefits these can provide to human body, these peptides are being widely explored. There is immense emphasis on the use of peptides based vaccines for treating cancer and chronic viral disease. When it comes to public health, vaccination remains among the most successful initiatives. Diseases like poliomyelitis and small pox were eradicated through vaccine. But still vaccines for many ailments remain elusive. Vaccines consist of inactivated or attenuated microorganisms and are delivered through injections. But in vitro culture of some microorganisms is difficult and producing inactive or live attenuated vaccine is impractical. Some materials in the pathogens may lead to unwanted host response or detrimental immune response.
The design and delivery of the vaccines are now enriched with our knowledge about targeted immune responses. This knowledge has proved that including specific protein antigens of the microorganisms into the recombinant vaccines can be beneficial in many cases. This finding is specifically important in cancer vaccination. The lysates or malignant cells may contain normal self-proteins with no therapeutic benefits. These can even contain materials with malignancy inducing capacity. That is why identifying tumor specific antigens are highly desirable.
The selection of most precise vaccine components is found in epitope based peptide vaccines. The immunogenic region of a protein antigen is represented by the peptide epitopes allowing specific direction of immunity responses. Human immunogenetics is diverse and peptide delivery and stability is difficult. That is why there are no peptide based vaccines for human beings available in the market. But researches have explored some strategies to enhance the stability and immunogenicity of peptides and this opens the way for peptide based vaccines in near future. Buy Online Peptides – USA Quality for research on peptide based vaccines.
Synthetic peptides in vaccine form
Ease of production and safety are two of the major factors of synthetic peptide vaccines. These offer more advantages over conventional vaccines containing inactivated or attenuated microorganisms. But the challenge is posed by the requirement of potent T cell stimulation and simple peptide’s poor immunogenicity. Currently approaches like delivering directly to dendritic cells, lipopeptide conjugation, and adjuvant science are being used in order to overcome the problems.
Engineering peptide vaccines
Strategies like cyclization, pegylation, amino-acid-sequence modification are being adopted to increase the effectiveness of peptides. As there are no peptide based vaccines, several trials are being carried out. Recent research reports indicate success in treating Hepatitis-C viral infections with multi-epitome approach. Peptide vaccination trials for different cancers are also being reported. Several new strategies are being developed for the delivery of the vaccines. The vaccines need systematic approach to achieve the desired response to individuals. The identification of HLA haplotypes based patient specific epitopes is allowed by evolving technology. As the immunologists are being armed with new technologies, they can examine successful immune response and its molecular ingredients better. The better drug like properties of peptides will open new ways for vaccine delivery attracting interest of the pharmaceutical industry.
