Reflecting recent work in the

Vaccines have had a profound impact on the management and prevention of infectious disease. In addition, the development of vaccines against chronic diseases has attracted considerable interest as an approach to prevent, rather than treat, conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and others. Subunit vaccines consist of nongenetic components of the infectious agent or disease-related epitope.

In this Review, the authors discuss peptide-based vaccines and their potential in three therapeutic areas: infectious disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. They discuss factors that contribute to vaccine efficacy and how these parameters may potentially be modulated by design.

They examine both clinically tested vaccines as well as nascent approaches and explore current challenges and potential remedies. While peptide vaccines hold substantial promise in the prevention of human
disease, many obstacles remain that have hampered their clinical use; thus, continued research efforts to address these challenges are warranted.