Application of carbohydrate array technology to antigen discovery and vaccine development

Abstract

Carbohydrate arrays are a new technology developed for high-throughput evaluation of interactions between carbohydrates and proteins, cells or viruses. Carbohydrate arrays contain many different carbohydrate structures on a solid support. The format allows one to probe hundreds or thousands of potential receptor–ligand interactions while using only tiny amounts of material. Recently, carbohydrate arrays have been applied to vaccine development in several ways. First, carbohydrate arrays have been utilized for the discovery and characterization of carbohydrate antigens. Second, they have been used to evaluate immune responses to vaccine candidates. Third, carbohydrate arrays have been used to identify and characterize reagents necessary for vaccine development. Although still at an early stage, carbohydrate array technology has tremendous potential for accelerating vaccine development.

Keywords::

• antibodies
• antigen arrays
• cancer vaccines
• carbohydrates
• glycans
• glycoconjugates
• microarrays
• polysaccharide vaccines
• post-translational modifications

Financial & competing interests disclosure

JC Gildersleeve and O Oyelaran are supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NCI. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.