Journal
VACCINES
Volume 9, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/vaccines9030222
Keywords
adjuvant; saponin; mechanism; SAR; QS-21; VSA-1; VSA-2
Categories
Funding
- NIH [GM120159, AI099407]
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Saponin adjuvants, particularly QS-21, have unique immunostimulating activity that induces balanced Th1/Th2 immunity and has been approved for human vaccines. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of QS-21 and other saponin adjuvants remain poorly understood, despite efforts to study their mechanisms and develop alternatives to circumvent drawbacks.
Saponin adjuvants have been extensively studied for their use in veterinary and human vaccines. Among them, QS-21 stands out owing to its unique profile of immunostimulating activity, inducing a balanced Th1/Th2 immunity, which is valuable to a broad scope of applications in combating various microbial pathogens, cancers, and other diseases. It has recently been approved for use in human vaccines as a key component of combination adjuvants, e.g., AS01b in Shingrix(R) for herpes zoster. Despite its usefulness in research and clinic, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of QS-21 and other saponin adjuvants are poorly understood. Extensive efforts have been devoted to studies for understanding the mechanisms of QS-21 in different formulations and in different combinations with other adjuvants, and to medicinal chemistry studies for gaining mechanistic insights and development of practical alternatives to QS-21 that can circumvent its inherent drawbacks. In this review, we briefly summarize the current understandings of the mechanism underlying QS-21's adjuvanticity and the encouraging results from recent structure-activity-relationship (SAR) studies.
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