A novel synthetic adjuvant enhances dendritic cell function.

The lipid core peptide (LCP) is a novel, synthetic, self-adjuvanted vaccine delivery system that neatly incorporates the adjuvant, carrier and antigenic peptides of a vaccine into a single molecular entity. This system has been previously shown to efficiently deliver vaccines and induce immunity. Because adjuvants target sentinels of the immune response, such as dendritic cells (DCs), that are widely distributed throughout the body to initiate specific immune responses, we investigated the effects of the adjuvant on DCs. Here we show that LCP targets vaccines to DCs and induces their activation.