Versatile Peptide-Based Adjuvant for Recombinant Vaccines
Opportunity
Novel small peptide adjuvant with high flexibility for vaccine induction of humoral and cellular immunity.
Recombinant or protein subunit vaccines contain purified fragments of pathogens or tumor cells to stimulate immune cells. They are safe and easy to manufacture but their low immunogenicity generally requires the identification of suitable adjuvants to couple up with. Most adjuvants in use confer subunit vaccine antigens the immunogenicity to induce humoral immunity but they are very weak in inducing CD8 T cell immunity, which is essential for efficacious viral and cancer vaccines.
The new series of peptide adjuvants presented herein have the unique property of enabling fused/conjugated/complexed vaccine protein antigens to induce CD8 T cells as well as CD4 T cell and antibody immunity. They should save significant time and resources in the development of protein subunit vaccines.
Technology
We have identified a naturally occurring peptide sequence and its optimized variants that can serve as an effective adjuvant for protein subunit vaccine candidates. Using recombinant/chemical/nanoparticle technology, this adjuvant can easily be added to vaccine candidates without significant increase in costs and processes to manufacture.
Based on this series of peptide, an ex vivo human vaccine development platform has been established to assess the immunogenicity of candidate vaccine antigens. Our expertise is mostly in the development of cancer vaccines, but the platform can be equally applied to vaccines for infectious diseases
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