Proteomics approaches towards antigen discovery and vaccine development.

Vaccines have proved to be powerful medical interventions, and recent advances in immunology and in microbial pathogen genomics now allow the rational design of molecularly defined vaccines. Classical proteomics and immunoproteomics approaches such as serological proteome analysis (SERPA) have already provided first vaccine candidate antigens. The same is true for approaches based on recombinant DNA technology, and in the future protein arrays may further accelerate this kind of research. Taken together, these technologies will allow identification of the full set of antigens (ie, the immunome) targeted by the immune system in a certain pathological situation. The comparison of multiple immunomes may allow the discovery of immunogenic structural features shared and conserved between different pathogens, which could form the basis of broadly protective vaccines. In this review, recent proteomics and other post-genomics approaches for the identification of antigens in infectious disease and cancer, as well as strategies for their characterization, are discussed.