Synthetic Virus-Like Particles from Self-Assembling Coiled-Coil Lipopeptides and Their Use in Antigen Display to the Immune System

摘要

Virus-like particles (VLPs) have attracted great interest in pharmaceutical and biotechnological research. VLPs are typically composed of recombinant proteins, for example, the capsid of the hepatitis B virus, sometimes in combination with nucleic acids, such as bacteriophage, or they may contain a viral envelope in addition to viral coat proteins, such as virosomes. The natural self-assembling core structures of many natural VLPs can be exploited to display multiple copies of an antigen across the surface of the particle, for example, by inserting oligonucleotides encoding peptide loops into the appropriate structural genes, or by chemically conjugating haptens to recombinant VLPs.