Chapter 12 - Nanovaccines delivery approaches against infectious diseases

Abstract

Todays, novel and/or resistant pathogenic micro-organisms emergence is a great challenge of the word, and the development of effective vaccines became a valuable preventive strategy against the threats of infectious diseases. New delivery systems can be an effective approach to improve available vaccines efficacy or to develop novel vaccines against old resistant or newly emerged infections. Now, the more prevalent commercial vaccines in the market are peptide/protein subunits and nucleic acid-based vaccines rather than killed/attenuated pathogens. In these types of vaccines, the suitable delivery system can improve the humoral and cell-mediated immunity against infectious pathogens, especially the resistant ones. Recently, the use of nanoparticle-based vaccines is the most attractive and promising one in the way to improve vaccine efficacy, immunization strategies, and targeted delivery to achieve desired immune responses at the cellular level. Nanotechnology-based delivery systems in vaccines can efficiently protect the protein or nucleic acid based antigens from degradation, and improve antigen uptake and presentation by antigen-presenting cells. The control release forms of vaccines can also be developed from nanoparticle-based systems. The most important consideration in nanodelivery of vaccines is that vehicle composition should be safe for human use and have special physicochemical properties for efficient vaccine delivery. In this chapter, nano particulate delivery systems of antigens, such as lipids, proteins, metals, or polymers (degradable/nondegradable) based delivery systems were discussed.