ABSTRACT

Leishmaniasis is a major public health problem of the world and Turkey. Recently there has been increasing interest in vaccine studies among strategies for control of leishmaniasis. Recently the increase of interest in vaccine studies among leish-maniasis control strategies makes the subject more up to date. So the aim of this review is to present information about recent vaccine studies, problems and new strategies for vaccine development studies. There are 3 generations of vaccine against leish-maniasis. First-generation vaccines are killed or live attenuated parasites; second-generation vaccines are recombinant or native antigens and live genetically modified parasites (knock out and suicidal cassettes), third generation vaccines are DNA vaccines. Also vector salivary proteins, dendritic cells and non-pathogenic L. tarentolae have been used as vaccine candidates. However there is still no effective vaccine against leishmaniasis. Since polymer conjugates considerably increase immunogenicity, poly-mer based vaccine studies have gained importance in recent years. However, there has not been such a study for an anti-leishmanial vaccine yet. LPG, surface antigen of Leishmania promastigotes, and polymer conjugates may be promising in anti-leishmanial vaccine studies so we are carrying out a TÜBİTAK Project on this subject which has been given the number, 1085170SBAG-4007.

Keywords: Vaccine, Leishmania, Polymer, DNA vaccine, Adjuvant