CURRENT DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES FOR VACCINES AND THE ROLE OF REVERSE VACCINOLOGY

The concept of vaccination has been around forcenturies .Vaccines constitutes cost-effective measures forpreventing disease. Advances in biotechnology and anunderstanding of the inductive and effector components ofimmune responses have ushered in a „golden age‟ ofvaccine development and implementation. Many licensedvaccines have one or more ideal characteristics, but nonemanifests them all. Of the generic vaccine technologies andvaccination strategies in different stages of development,some have already demonstrated their flexibility,practicality, robustness and potential simplicity ofproduction and others hold promise for the future.Although conventional methods of development ofvaccines are successful in many cases, this approach took along time to provide vaccines against those pathogens forwhich the solution was easy and failed to provide a solutionfor those bacteria and parasites that did not have obviousimmunodominant protective antigens. The reverseapproach to vaccine development takes advantage of thegenome sequence of the pathogen. This approach allowsnot only the identification of all the antigens seen by theconventional methods, but also the discovery of novelantigens that work on a totally different paradigm. With thegenome sequences of many bacteria, parasites and virusesto be completed in the near future, many vaccinesimpossible to develop will become reality, and novelvaccines, using non-conventional antigens (i.e. nonstructuralproteins) can be develope