Pathogen-like particles: biomimetic vaccine carriers engineered at the nanoscale

• Recent advances in bionanotechnology are poised to have a major impact on vaccines.
• Synthetic particulate vaccines offer advantages for precisely engineered delivery.
• Virus-derived particles offer nanoscale, acellular pathogen mimicry.
• Engineered bacterial outer membrane vesicles offer unique immunostimulation.
• Pathogen-like particle (PLP) vaccine targets range from viruses to cancer.

Vaccine adjuvants are an essential component of vaccine design, helping to generate immunity to pathogen antigens in the absence of infection. Recent advances in nanoscale engineering have created a new class of particulate bionanotechnology that uses biomimicry to better integrate adjuvant and antigen. These pathogen-like particles, or PLPs, can come from a variety of sources, ranging from fully synthetic platforms to biologically derived, self-assembling systems. By employing molecularly engineered targeting and stimulation of key immune cells, recent studies utilizing PLPs as vaccine delivery platforms have shown great promise against high-impact, unsolved vaccine targets ranging from bacterial and viral pathogens to cancer and addiction.

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