Prospects for an asthma vaccine

Abstract

The desire to create a vaccine that might prevent or cure asthma is irresistibly attractive and widely regarded as one of the main goals in translational asthma research. Several broad vaccination strategies, including immunotherapy against allergens or immunodominant peptide epitopes, induction of immune deviation using vaccines, exploiting adjuvant-like immunomodulation, targeting of damaging cytokines or cells, provocation of directed cell-mediated cytotoxicity, modification of antigen-presenting cells to induce vaccine-like effects and targeting of common infectious pathogens to reduce exacerbations, have demonstrated proof-of-principal in model systems, and some of these concepts have b..