ACTA FAC MED NAISS 2011;28(1):5-15

Review article

UDC: 615.371:575.1

Selective Immunotherapy by Engineered Chimeric Molecules

Nikolina Mihaylova, Andrey Tchorbanov

Department of Immunology, Stefan Angelov Institute of Microbiology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria


SUMMARY

In many physiological processes, peptides play a critical role as neurotransmitters, hormones, antibiotics, etc. They have research importance in fields such as immunology, pharmacology, neuroscience and cell biology. There are many approaches for immunotherapies: some of them use the peptides as important components of chimeric molecules for immunosuppression, the others - as peptide-based vaccines for immunostimulation. These immunotherapeutic strategies offer the advantages of being safe, easy to produce, devoid of oncogenic potential, and can be chemically or genetically engineered into defined conformational active form. The peptides contain very important functional part called epitope, which is recognized by the immune system, specifically by antibodies, B or T cell receptors. Epitopes play a prominent role in the peptide-based vaccines and disease diagnosis. Protein-engineered or genetically engineered peptides conjugated to antibody-carrier could be used as a targeting device delivering the epitopes to the cells of interest.

Key words: immuno-peptides, SLE, Inhibitory B cell receptors, chimeric molecules, complement receptors, DNA vaccines