Cell-free systems for vaccine production

Cell-free (CF) systems is harness cellular components including tRNAs, ribosomes, and polymerase to synthesize proteins in vitro. Owing to their significant CF systems offer substantial advantages over traditional cell-based systems, including higher speed, biosafety, and portability. As a result, CF systems have emerged as a powerful platform for biomedical research, with particularly promising applications in biosensing and diagnostics, protein production, synthetic biology and vaccine development. In this chapter, we provided a comprehensive overview of CF system applications in the field of biomedical sciences, with an emphasis on vaccine development and production. We also discussed their successful applications in the expression of antigens from challenging pathogens, such as Plasmodium falciparum, Chlamydia muridarum, and SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, this chapter proposed several promising innovations to address current limitations of CF platforms such as the shortage of post-translational modifications, endotoxin presence, and high production cost. Emerging solutions include glycoengineering to introduce functional glycosylation, freeze-drying for improving storage and distribution, exosome-based delivery for designing next generation vaccines, and even machine learning integration, to optimize the production pipelines.