From the eradication of smallpox through to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been a cornerstone in the fight against infectious diseases in humans and livestock since the 18th century. Although vaccines against COVID-19 are unlikely to eradicate the disease in the way that the smallpox vaccine did, they have proved very effective in preventing death and hospitalisation, with enormous societal and economic benefits. There is now considerable research effort invested in building on the success of prophylactic vaccines in controlling infectious disease through the development of therapeutic vaccines for chronic diseases such as inflammation and cancer. These approaches are based on down-regulating or up-regulating immune responses for the treatment of inflammatory disease and cancer respectively, through judicious choice of epitopes, adjuvants and mode of the display to the immune system. Though such therapeutic vaccines have shown some early promise, no commercially available products are yet available.
Read the full article: Editorial: Research, Development and Clinical Trials for Peptide-Based Vaccines
By Shisong Jiang, Min Gong and Xiao-Ning Xu
Published in Frontiers in Immunology on 22nd April 2022