Mucosal adjuvants: Opportunities and challenges

Most pathogens access the body via mucosal surfaces. Mucosal vaccination is a highly effective and recommended method to prevent mucosally transmitted infections. Compared with immunization via intramuscular injection, mucosal immunization offers remarkable advantages, including non-invasiveness, low costs and reduced risk of transmission of blood-borne diseases, which make it more acceptable to human beings, especially to young children. However, only few mucosal vaccines are licensed for human, which is mainly due to the deficiency of safe and effective mucosal adjuvants. Adjuvants, as important components of most vaccines, are essential to enhance immunity and induce immune memory. The development of mucosal adjuvants, unfortunately, has been severely hampered by research strategies based on empiric trials and non-comprehensive methods for safety evaluation. Therefore, changing the research and development strategies of mucosal adjuvant field from empiricism based discovery to rational design based invention is highly demanded. The change of strategies mainly depends upon clarification of mechanism of mucosal adjuvant activity though a combination of life science, information science and materials science.