Drug Information Q&A Q45. What will the future of vaccines be like?
Answer
Many new vaccines are being researched and developed, including new vaccines for diseases for which no vaccines were previously available, combination vaccines to reduce the physical burden on infants, and adjuvant technology to obtain an adequate immune response with a small amount of antigen, and the possibilities for vaccines are expanding.
Explanation
Currently, the need for combination vaccines is increasing. As the number of vaccine-preventable diseases increases, so does the number of preventive vaccines that children, especially infants, receive.
Since a single vaccine can prevent infection from multiple pathogens, combination vaccines have been actively developed in recent years as a major burden reliever for children who need to receive many vaccines in a short period of time.
In addition to vaccines for children, vaccines for the elderly and women have also been developed.
A typical example for women is a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. It is known that more than 90% of cervical cancer cases are caused by infection with the carcinogenic human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus that originally causes "warts" and infects many people, but a small percentage of women infected with a high-risk form of the virus are unable to eliminate the virus from their bodies and develop cellular abnormalities, A small number of women infected with the high-risk type of the virus are unable to eliminate the virus from their bodies and develop cervical cancer through cellular abnormalities and precancerous conditions. The vaccine for cervical cancer is said to produce antibodies over a long period of time and prevent HPV infection.
In addition, other vaccines have been developed to reinforce the efficacy of the vaccine, but not the vaccine itself. Many of the vaccines developed in recent years contain adjuvants, which are substances that strengthen the immune response. The advantage of adjuvants is that they provide sufficient immunity to fight disease even when the amount of the pathogen in the vaccine is small.
For example, in the early stages of a new influenza pandemic, there is no vaccine because the type of virus is not known. Only after the virus is known can a vaccine be produced. On the other hand, disease epidemics do not wait, so in order to make vaccines available to the public as soon as possible, it is possible to produce vaccines for the entire population in a short period of time by combining adjuvant technology, which requires only a small amount per person.
In recent years, research on vaccines to treat cancer has been conducted in many countries around the world. Cancer cells may have more characteristic proteins on their surface than normal cells. Immune cells such as killer T cells in our body attack cancer cells by targeting these proteins. Our body uses this mechanism to suppress the proliferation of cancer cells. This property is expected to be utilized in the treatment of cancer.
In the future, we can expect to see the introduction of more convenient vaccines, such as "eating vaccines," which do not require injections, and "vaccines that can be applied to the skin.
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