ABSTRACT

Many vaccines in routine clinical and veterinary use are administered with immunological adjuvants. These agents derive their name from the latin term adjuvare (meaning to help) and are required to enhance the immunogenicity and therefore the effectiveness of vaccines. This is particularly appropriate for new generation vaccines which are based on weakly immunogenic protein subunits or synthetic peptides. Although, only the aluminium based adjuvants have been approved for widespread use in humans, they do not fulfil all the requirements of new generation vaccines due to a number of limitations (described below), and therefore a number of newer adjuvants are currently undergoing investigation and clinical trials. These adjuvants comprise a vasdy diverse group of compounds and indeed their adjuvanticity may be their only common functional characteristic (Kersten and Crommelin, 1995).