Peptide Vaccination

Vaccination is the most cost-effective measure to control the pathological effects of an infectious agent (1 ,2 ). With the combined use of molecular cloning and of modern sequencing methods, the sequence of many protein components present in different infectious agents have been elucidated, opening the way to the design and development of various vaccination strategies which include peptides, proteins and DNA. Peptide vaccination is per se the most simple, straightforward, and, in our opinion, safest approach to vaccination of the world population. For peptide, we intend protein fragments of any length obtained from chemical synthesis (3 -5 ). One drawback of using short peptides is the limitation of the intervention to defined members of the population that carry the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigen(s) which the peptides bind to (MHC restriction). This limitation can, in principle, be overcome by using a physical or chemical mixture of short peptides or to lengthen the size of the peptide fragment in order to cover the MHC antigens of the entire population (6 ,7 ).