Vaccine development for potential bioterrorism agents.

Vaccines are considered to be one of the most effective ways of combating disease caused by bioterrorism agents. Such vaccines must be able to provide protection against pathogens which might enter the body by a number of routes, including the respiratory tract. They should also be able to induce protective immunity rapidly and would ideally be given non-invasively. There are few vaccines which currently meet these requirements. In part, this reflects the low level of research on many bioterrorism agents over the past few decades. Little is known about basic mechanisms of pathogenicity of many of these agents. However, by their very nature these agents cause serious disease, and must be handled in high containment laboratories. This requirement also limits the speed and ease with which research on these pathogens can now take place. Against this background, research on vaccines against potential bioterrorism agents is likely to proceed along two lines. Firstly because the genome sequences of most of the principal bioterrorism agents have either been completed or are close to completion, there is likely to be reliance on the exploitation of this information to devise improved vaccines. A number of groups are working on methodologies to identify vaccine antigens directly from genome sequences. Secondly, there will be a need to formulate such vaccines appropriately for the rapid induction of protective immunity after non-invasive delivery. The prospects for the development of a new generation of bioterrorism vaccines which exploit these technologies are reviewed in this manuscript.