Peptide-Based Vaccines: Current Progress and Future Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

Vaccines are perhaps the most successful discovery of biomedical sciences, and prevent approximately 2–3 million deaths annually. Representing a step forward, peptide-based vaccines have revolutionized disease management and prevention against various infectious diseases, including viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic diseases. They have also gained researchers’ interest regarding the prevention, rather than treatment, of other chronic diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Peptide-based vaccines (also called subunit vaccines) consist of immunogenic components of infectious agents or disease-associated epitopes. These vaccines aim to impart protective immunity with prior exposure of pathogen-specific epitopes to the host’s protective immune cells. The major challenge is to find a pathogen-specific epitope that could direct the immune response against the pathogen. In contrast, while developing vaccines against self-antigens to cure various chronic and autoimmune diseases, the immune system plays a crucial role in suppressing response to self-antigens. This Special Issue invites quality research works exploring peptide-based vaccine development against infectious, chronic, and autoimmune diseases for publication.

Dr. Shailendra Kumar Verma
Dr. Rajan Kumar Pandey
Guest Editors

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