In today’s world, vaccines are of prime importance in dealing with infectious diseases. The role of vaccines has been further expanded to include the management of cancer. Vaccines can be administered for both prophylactic and therapeutic purposes, although their use in therapy is limited. Traditional live or attenuated vaccines may cause allergic reactions; therefore, subunit vaccines consisting of purified antigen were developed to address this limitation. However, subunit vaccines suffer from the limitation of poor antigenicity due to the absence of pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPS). This can be overcome by administering the subunit vaccine along with adjuvants in particulate form. The particulate form of antigens and adjuvants can be delivered to the same sentinels, thus limiting the biodistribution and toxic potential of adjuvants. It can also be used to deliver mRNA, and is being currently used currently to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic by Pfizer and Moderna in the US.

Methods that will be captured in this collection are: methods to prepare nano and microparticulate vaccines, especially via spray drying due to its scalable potential; In-vitro evaluation of vaccine efficacy by using maturation markers (CD40, CD80, MHC I and II) prior to in-vivo experiments; different administration routes including intramuscular route (IM) and skin via microneedle or laser treatment; testing methods for measuring the in-vivo efficacy of vaccine via ELISA, avidity assay, flow cytometry, etc. Moreover, we invite protocols describing various cutting-edge technologies related to vaccine development and testing.