CURRENT DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES FOR VACCINES AND THE ROLE OF REVERSE VACCINOLOGY

Abstract

The concept of vaccination has been around for
centuries .Vaccines constitutes cost-effective measures for
preventing disease. Advances in biotechnology and an
understanding of the inductive and effector components of
immune responses have ushered in a „golden age‟ of
vaccine development and implementation. Many licensed
vaccines have one or more ideal characteristics, but none
manifests them all. Of the generic vaccine technologies and
vaccination strategies in different stages of development,
some have already demonstrated their flexibility,
practicality, robustness and potential simplicity of
production and others hold promise for the future.
Although conventional methods of development of
vaccines are successful in many cases, this approach took a
long time to provide vaccines against those pathogens for
which the solution was easy and failed to provide a solution
for those bacteria and parasites that did not have obvious
immunodominant protective antigens. The reverse
approach to vaccine development takes advantage of the
genome sequence of the pathogen. This approach allows
not only the identification of all the antigens seen by the
conventional methods, but also the discovery of novel
antigens that work on a totally different paradigm. With the
genome sequences of many bacteria, parasites and viruses
to be completed in the near future, many vaccines
impossible to develop will become reality, and novel
vaccines, using non-conventional antigens (i.e. nonstructural
proteins) can be developed