Implantable vaccines: a solution for immune system manipulation to any antigenic stimulus

Ioanna Zerva,Irene Athanassakis,Vasileia Pateraki

doi:10.29245/2578-3009/2020/4.1193

Abstract

Effective and side-effect-free vaccines are still difficult tasks to achieve for a great majority of antigenic stimuli. Pathogen manipulation to abort infectivity and antigen delivery to ensure immune responsiveness are the major components vaccine technology tries to resolve. However, the development of an immune response is still a complicated matter, lies on hundreds of parameters and any effort towards activation can easily lead to adverse effects, making immunotherapy very difficult to control. The present review attempts to highlight the major parameters affecting immune responsiveness and show that vaccine technology, except from pathogen manipulation and the development of antigen delivery systems, requires attention to additional check-points. Analyzing the recently described personalized implantable vaccine technology, it becomes obvious that the nature of each antigenic stimulus dictates different responsiveness to the organism, which discourages the use of universal adjuvant and antigen-delivery systems. On the contrary, the ex vivo tuning of the immune response proposed by the implantable vaccine technology, allows controllable amendment of the response. The development of personalized technologies is expected to provide valuable tools for the management of human pathology.

Highlights

The immune system is meant to function in response to any antigenic stimulus, which includes any substance, from small molecules to big proteins, nucleic acids, lipids etc
Analyzing the recently described personalized implantable vaccine technology, it becomes obvious that the nature of each antigenic stimulus dictates different responsiveness to the organism, which discourages the use of universal adjuvant and antigen-delivery systems
The present review focuses on the advantages of solid implantable, ex vivo activated scaffolds as to their ability to finely tune the response to an antigenic stimulus over degradable materials delivered to the organism

Summary

Introduction

The immune system is meant to function in response to any antigenic stimulus, which includes any substance, from small molecules (haptens) to big proteins, nucleic acids, lipids etc. The present review attempts to highlight the major parameters affecting immune responsiveness and show that vaccine technology, except from pathogen manipulation and the development of antigen delivery systems, requires attention to additional check-points. Analyzing the recently described personalized implantable vaccine technology, it becomes obvious that the nature of each antigenic stimulus dictates different responsiveness to the organism, which discourages the use of universal adjuvant and antigen-delivery systems.

Results

Conclusion