Recent advances in vaccine delivery

The field of vaccination is moving from the use of attenuated or inactivated pathogens to safer but less immunogenic protein and peptide antigens, which require stronger adjuvant compositions. Antigen delivery carriers appear to play an important role in vaccine development, providing not only antigen protection and controlled release but also an intrinsic adjuvant potential. Among them, carriers based on polymers and lipids are the most representative ones. Patent applications in this area have disclosed, either the design and preparation methods for new biocompatible antigen delivery systems or the application of the previously developed systems for the delivery of novel antigens. Some of them have also reported the use of these technologies for modern therapeutic vaccination approaches.