CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Vaccination has been one of the most successful and the most significant scientificadvances in human health and life expectancy all around the globe. The World HealthOrganization considers that immunization should be recognized as the main component of humanhealth right, due to the fact that vaccination prevents 2.5 million deaths annually (World HealthOrganization, 2011). The most successful vaccines have been developed using conventionalmethods that follow the paradigm established by Pasteur: "to isolate, inactivate and inject" thepathogen microorganism and mimic a natural infection. Recently, metagenomics have played animportant role in the discovery of new immunogens for vaccine design and the selection ofantigens based on genomic information. The main approach that has used this strategy has beencalled "reverse vaccinology". This promising and arising field allows the screening of the entirepotential antigenic repertoire of an organism using predictive bioinformatic tools. Once theantigenic protein or proteins have been selected, they are expressed and purified using molecularcloning and in vitro expression techniques. Following the in vitro production step, they are probedin animal models to evaluate the in vivo protective strength of the immune response. The main aimof this in vivo approach is to evaluate the ability of the immune response to eliminate or neutralizethe pathogen at the time of infection. Those antigens capable of generate a specific immuneresponse with neutralizing activity for natural infections are the best candidate vaccines. In thisreview we summarize the evolution of vaccinology since its inception, with special emphasis onthe development of VLPs as vaccine platforms and their future in preventive medicine and weintroduce a new recombinant platform for antigen presentation based on Junin virus VLPs(JUNV-VLPs).