Do You Know the Peptide Vaccine in Peptide Medications?

1. What are peptide medications?

Peptide medication is a peptide biopharmaceutical medication that can be used for disease prevention, treatment and diagnosis. The preparation methods mainly include chemical peptide synthesis, separation and purification methods and genetic engineering methods. Among them, chemical peptide synthesis is the main preparation method of peptide drugs. Although peptide drugs can be obtained by separation and purification from organisms, the content of naturally occurring peptide molecules is small and cannot fully meet the needs of clinical applications. The chemical peptide synthesis method is realized by the chemical reaction of the gradual condensation of amino acids, generally from the carboxyl end to the amino end, repeating the process of adding amino acids one by one.

Peptide drugs mainly include peptide vaccines, anti-tumor peptides, antiviral peptides, peptide-oriented drugs, cytokine mimic peptides, antibacterial active peptides, diagnostic peptides, and other small medicinal peptides. Compared with general organic small molecule drugs, peptide medications have the outstanding characteristics of strong biological activity, small dosage, low toxic and side effects and significant curative effect. However, their half-life is generally short, unstable, and easy to be rapidly degraded in the body.

2. What are peptide vaccines?

In addition to peptide vaccines, peptide drugs have relatively small immunogenicity, less drug dosage, higher unit activity, easy synthesis, modification and optimization, high product purity, controllable quality, and rapid determination of medicinal value compared with protein macromolecular drugs. Peptide vaccine is a vaccine prepared by chemical peptide synthesis technology according to the known or predicted amino acid sequence of a certain epitope in the pathogen antigen gene. Peptide vaccines are currently an important direction of vaccine research, and peptide vaccines for HIV and hepatitis C virus have been developed. Traditional vaccines are generally prepared in two ways: One is an attenuated vaccine that can induce immunity but does not cause disease, such as yellow fever, polio and measles vaccine or BCG vaccine, the other is an inactivated vaccine, such as Bacillus pertussis , Rabies virus, typhoid bacillus.

Since the peptide vaccine is completely synthetic, there is no problem of recovery of virulence or incomplete inactivation, particularly for some microbial pathogens that have not been able to obtain sufficient amounts of antigens through in vitro culture. Although some can be cultured in vitro, these pathogens have potential pathogenicity and immunopathological effects related to safety and effectiveness. Peptides, as immunogens that cause effector cell immune responses in the body, will become a new type of vaccine.