Challenges, Limitations and Advancement of Vaccines and Adjuvants

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Emerging infectious diseases are threats to human health and global stability. Although the incidence of infectious diseases has declined since year 2000, we are continuously facing economic burden and extremely dreadful health threats where sudden increase of uncontrollable global morbidity and mortality occurs as of COVID-19 pandemic today. Vaccines are biological preparations that improve host immunity against particular disease. Vaccination is a process of introducing foreign antigenic (better with immunogenic) epitopes to target host in a form of whole bacteria or viruses (inactivated or attenuated), proteins, or nucleotides to eventually induce protective memory responses in the host. Needless to say, the vaccination has been a key strategy to control diseases and contributed a great deal to improve a quality of life for humans and economic animals. Adjuvant is essentially required to improve the efficacy of vaccine via enhancing the host immune responses. The main action mechanism of the adjuvants is to improve immunogenicity of antigen presenting cells to induce memory responses in T cells and B cells, resulting in a long-term protection against target pathogen. Aluminum-containing adjuvants were not only the first but a long-term used as human vaccine adjuvant in clinical use. As the platform technology of vaccines evolved from attenuated or inactivated whole vaccine to small molecule vaccines, new and advanced adjuvants are being investigated. For instance, the first vaccine containing an AS04 was licensed in 2005, and since then several adjuvants such as AS04, AS03, MF59 or AS01 in a various formulation have been licensed or approved by regulatory authorities in some countries. Despite the presence of successful vaccines, currently many emerging diseases need a proof-of-concept vaccine together with appropriate adjuvants. The current Special issue of the Vaccines, entitled ‘Challenges, limitations and advancement of vaccines and adjuvants’ focuses on the platform and technologies (i.e., material science and synthetic biology), target delivery, and a formulation of vaccine and adjuvant, maximizing their protective immune responses, and validation of the vaccines. Furthermore, the articles in relation to future prospecting, preparedness, efficacy, reactogenicity, validation and advancement of vaccines and adjuvants together with their limitations and challenges are all welcome. Most of all, I trust that revealing the action mechanism of vaccines and adjuvants will not only illuminate vaccine-related research activities to scientific communities but also get an attention from the public, industry, (inter)national funding agencies and government, contributing a great deal to improve ones’ life quality and equity in the world. 

Prof. Dr. Cheol-Heui Yun
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Vaccines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• adjuvant
• efficacy of vaccine
• infectious diseases
• memory responses
• mucosal responses
• nucleotide vaccine
• platform technology
• protective immune response
• subunit vaccine
• validation of vaccine