title: New adjuvants in evolving vaccine strategies.
abstract: Adjuvants are becoming the key players of vaccine formulations to enhance the immunogenicity of subunit (peptides, proteins, virus-like particles (VLPs)) and DNA vaccines, as well as to reach the current new goals of preventing and/or treating chronic infectious diseases and cancers. Induction of humoral response, in particular neutralizing antibodies able to inhibit the binding of pathogens to their cellular receptors, remains a major goal of vaccines targeted to prevent acute lytic infections; induction/modulation of cellular immunity is, however, critical to fight latently/chronically infected cells as well as cancer cells. The new adjuvants, included in vaccine preparations, are currently able to modify the presentation of epitopes to the immune system with a specific T(H)1 versus T(H)2 polarization efficacy. A paradigm of the relevance of these new adjuvants is the immunological result obtained with the inclusion of monophosphoryl lipid A in the formulation of L1-based human papillomavirus (HPV)-naked VLPs. In the May issue of this journal, Garcon and colleagues describe the highly enhanced humoral and memory B cellular immunity of the AS04-adjuvanted HPV vaccine, which results in a long-lasting and broad spectrum immunity.
authors: Molecular Biology and Viral Oncology, Dpt of Experimental Oncology, Istituto Nazionale Tumori Fond Pascale, Napoli, Italy. fm.buonaguro@istitutotumori.na.it
authors: Franco M
authors: FM
authors: Buonaguro
authors: Maria Lina
authors: ML
authors: Tornesello
authors: Luigi
authors: L
authors: Buonaguro