VPB 321: Animal Biotechnology (2+1)

SUBUNIT VACCINES 

• Vaccines generally consist of either killed or attenuated forms of the whole pathogenic agent.
• The antibodies elicited by these vaccines initiate an immune response to inactivate (neutralize) pathogenic organisms, by binding to proteins on the outer surface of the agents.
• In order to avoid the whole organisms for vaccines, for their disadvantages, purified outer-surface viral proteins, either capsid or envelope proteins were tried.
• They are sufficient for eliciting neutralizing antibodies in the host organism. Vaccines that use components of a pathogenic organism rather than the whole organism are called subunit vaccines.