Idiotypic vaccines and infectious diseases.

The discovery of vaccination by Jenner, as well as the development of the principle of vaccines by Pasteur, had an enormous impact on the eradication of many infectious diseases. These developments opened the road to the development of attenuated (i.e., live) or inactivated (i.e., noninfectious) vaccines; however, such vaccines are not without problems and can have detrimental effects. Indeed, attenuated vaccines can revert to a more virulent form, and inactivated vaccines may produce serious side effects. There also are several infectious diseases for which no vaccines are available. For example, many parasitic infections cannot be prevented by vaccination. These facts, together with recent developments in the fields of molecular and cellular biology, have led to the creation of a new generation of vaccines (73): recombinant-DNA vaccines, synthetic-peptide vaccines (63), and idiotypic vaccines (3, 13, 46). In this paper, I review the principle of idiotypic vaccines, the experimental systems in which they have been used, and their potential advantages over other vaccines.