ABSTRACT
Since, the time of Pasteur and early microbiology, infectious diseases have traditionally been countered by prophylactic measures entailing vaccination with killed or attenuated microorganisms or their products. Considering that, of communicable diseases with established etiology, fungal diseases were among the first to be recognized, it is rather surprising that the development of vaccines to manage mycoses lags far behind that of bacterial or viral vaccines. This, despite the continuous increase in serious fungal infections in compromised hosts, and in view that introduction of new antifungal drugs still do not completely solve the management of systemic mycoses. Hence, the need for prevention of mycoses by vaccination or boosting of the immune system as adjunct to specific antifungal therapy in order to combat the infections became even more pronounced. The difficulty in the development of antifungal vaccines may reside in the fact that fungi are eukaryotic, relatively large, and at times multicellular that renders the identification and/or isolation of any specific immunogenic components with protective potential. This in addition to the difficulty to define the candidate population to be vaccinated or the specific fungal pathogen for a vaccine in a given compromised population. Nevertheless, attempts to immunize against fungal agents that cause superficial or systemic mycoses have been made [see reviews and chapters by Casadevall (2001), Cutler et al. (2001), Deepe (1997; 2001), Dixon et al. (1998), and Kirkland and Cole (2001)]. The vaccination studies were based on observations from extensive and indepth investigations on the immune responses elicited by fungi and the role of the different components of the immune system, as summarized in several reviews by Casadevall et al. (1998) and Stevens et al. (1998), mostly involved experimental animal models with few reaching the stage of clinical human trials.
