Nanoparticles-Based Antigen/DNA Vaccines against Various Infectious Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

There are substantial challenges in developing effective vaccines against a specific infectious disease as they fail to elicit optimally mutated antibodies and are also susceptible to other relevant general biases in the immune system through immunological imprinting to prior infections.

On the other hand, some smart pathogens adopt intracellular parasitism as a strategy to avoid antibody onslaught, The development of effective vaccines against intracellular pathogens is more complicated as here antibodies have a limited role to play. An effective vaccine against intracellular pathogens has to activate pathogen-specific cytotoxic lymphocytes in the host.

Engineered vaccines with natural or synthetic materials can induce broadly neutralizing antibodies and strong memory responses against infections. Among these, nano-vaccines have the potential to provide distinct advantages of structural and size proximity to pathogens, tunable physiochemical and biophysical properties, protection of the vaccine antigen from degradation or rapid clearance, improved transport through lymphatics and into the immune follicles of lymph nodes, as well as co-delivery of immunomodulatory molecules to boost immune recognition. In fact, the transport and spatial localization of a vaccine entity (nanovaccine) in lymph nodes regulate how specialized immune cells (B and T lymphocytes), encounter vaccine antigens. It is also important that whether a frontline immune cell population interacts with soluble or particulate forms of an antigen. During the immune response to an infection, antigen-primed B cells clonally expand within B-cell follicles of lymph nodes and undergo secondary diversification of their immunoglobulin genes, followed by the selection of rare winner cells, called plasma cells and memory B cells. Naive B cells in lymph nodes can encounter antigens in B-cell follicles either through direct binding of their immature B-cell receptors (BCR) or on the surfaces of resident antigen-presenting cells, including follicular dendritic cells (FDCs). A key question is how nano vaccines carrying complex antigens traffic inside the B-cell follicles reach FDCs and whether this localization is necessary. After immunization, the nano vaccines are picked up in the flow of interstitial fluid and localized to various parts of a lymph node.

The nano vaccines have great potential to facilitate cross-presentation of encapsulated antigens by dendritic cells thereby activating target-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes for the effective killing of cancer, virus-infected, and other intracellular pathogen-harboring infected cells. The immunoprophylactic efficiency can be further enhanced by grafting TLR / STING specific ligands on the surface of nano-vaccines. Keeping into consideration the potential of nanoparticles to home the drug/antigen at a desirable site, it is desirable to develop a variety of nanoparticle-based antigen delivery systems and evaluate their prophylactic potential against model diseases. 

Prof. Dr. Mohammad Owais
Guest Editor

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• nano-particle
• infectious diseases
• liposome
• adjuvant
• TLR agonist