Nanovaccines design and applications

Vaccination is a process of introducing antigenic material to activate an individual's immune system to develop adaptive immunity to a pathogen; historically, vaccines are made by organic components derived from the same microorganisms that are responsible in the first place for the same diseases that need to be treated, and because of that there’s always been a trade-off that needed to be taken in consideration between the effectiveness of the vaccine and its ability to cause an immune response in the subject. Because of this, in the last decade, advances in materials engineering have opened up new avenues for innovative vaccine designs, with synthetic nanoparticles starting to be widely adopted for vaccine development. These particles have shown to be capable of inducing strong cellular immune responses against antigen targets. Compared to live attenuated viral vaccines, synthetic nanoparticles promise better safety profiles because of their non-replicating nature, while still being able to be more effective than classic subunit vaccines. As time went by, a wider selection of materials has been used as so-called “nanocarries”, going from inorganic components, such as gold or silica, to organic ones, liposomes and VLP (virus-like particles) being some of the examples.