CHAPTER 12: Designing an Effective Peptide Vaccine

The traditional strategy for producing prophylactic vaccines from live-attenuated or inactivated microorganisms, and more recently from a subset of the pathogen’s proteins, is unsuitable in certain cases, due to safety issues and/or unproductive or even detrimental immune responses. An alternative strategy is to focus the immune response towards only the minimal peptide epitopes that are the target of the protective response. In parallel, therapeutic peptide vaccines are being developed for conditions such as cancer, allergy and autoimmune diseases. Although no peptide vaccine has yet been approved for human therapy, considerable progress has been made in understanding the rules of design for such a vaccine.