| Abstract: | Immune vaccination is a critically important strategy in disease prevention and treatment. In vaccination, efficient vaccine carriers are necessary to augment the immune response initiated by vaccines generally with weak immunogenecity. Nowadays, commercially available vaccine/carrier formulations induce effective humoral immunity but weak or none cellular immunity. However, in practice, cellular rather than humoral immunity plays the key role in treating some intractable diseases such as AIDS and cancers, in which the elicited cytotoxic T lymphocytes can directly kill HIV-infected or cancer cells. To trigger potent cellular immunity, the carriers should help antigens escape from endosomal/lysosomal degradation and release them directly into the cytosol of antigen presenting cells. To this aim, such kind of vaccine carriers should be rationally designed and prepared in terms of their structure and physiochemical properties. Here, we summarized the recent advances in pH-responsive vaccine carriers exclusively developed for improving cellular immunity. |
