Vaccines are used to provide immunity against diseases before our bodies are exposed to pathogens. This is done by injecting antigens in the body to prevent infection by certain pathogens or aims to relieve its symptoms. Vaccines can be classified into live and inactivated, according to the form of the injected antigen.

Genetic recombination technology can be used to express specific proteins that are associated with the defense of pathogens. And so, diverse types of vaccines, such as subunit vaccines, can be developed by these technologies. These vaccines are safer than traditional vaccines as there is no need to produce the disease-causing virus to inject into the body. However, the vaccines also have a weakness that requires more than one dose and an added adjuvant to the expressed recombinant protein vaccine because of low level of antigenicity. Recently, advances in vaccine technology have led to the emergence of vaccine antigens based on virus-like particles (VLP) that can overcomes the weaknesses of these recombinant protein vaccines. VLPs have a similar structure to that of pathogenic viruses, but are expected to have great potential for improvement in stability and immunity issues in current existing vaccines.

Comparison between the VLP Vaccine and Other Vaccines

VLP has the same envelope structure as a virus, but does not contain any genetic components, making it an excellent technology to be used for effective immune induction with added safety for human use; VLP vaccines from genetic recombinant protein technology consists of a similar shape of the pathogenic virus, without the genetic material causing infection.