Will allergen fusion bring new energy to immunotherapy?

摘要: Although specific immunotherapy is currently only performed with aqueous allergen extracts, second-generation allergy vaccines may rather rely upon well-defined recombinant allergens [1]. The latter represent an attractive alternative to natural allergen extracts, since they can be produced in large quantities with consistent quality. In most circumstances, however, multiple allergens are involved in sensitization, making the recombinant allergen approach very complex as it requires a comprehensive characterization of each individual component of the vaccine. In this context, an interesting strategy is to fuse together several wild-type or mutated allergens, or peptidic fragments, using recombinant DNA technologies (fig. 1). In such fusions, allergens can be further linked to heterologous molecules, used as carriers to enhance stability and immunogenicity (eg by facilitating uptake by antigen-presenting cells), thereby …