Horizons in Chemical Immunology – Approaches to Synthetic Vaccine Design

The main aim of this short review is to provide an up-to-date perspective of the properties a synthetic molecule must have in order to elicit a pathogen-specific humoral immune response. Chemistry will have an increasingly important role to play in the future rational design and optimization of molecules that impact on the immune system, e.g. as vaccines, vaccine adjuvants, or as immunostimulants and immunosuppressants. This follows from the rapidly unfolding understanding of how the adaptive and innate arms of the immune system work, which includes the 3D structure determination of many key receptors and signalling molecules – this opens the whole field to the rational chemical design of immunomodulatory molecules (chemical immunology).