Peptides in immunoengineering

The immune system plays a critical role in our health. When functioning correctly, the immune system continually protects us from the most common to the most deadly and mysterious maladies: common influenza to HIV and cancer. When functioning incorrectly, autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis ensue. Understanding how the immune system functions and learning how to rationally control it to protect against or treat disease has been a challenge historically burdened by the immunology and medical fields. Recently, exciting strides in immunological discoveries and investigational tools have allowed outsiders to enter the fold, chief among them being the biomaterials field. With biomaterials as an engineering tool, rational manipulation of the immune system at the cellular and molecular levels has expanded, shedding new light on the functioning of the immune system while also showing promising preclinical and clinical data for more effective and safer treatments. As a flourishing subset of the biomaterials field, peptides have been used as a major design component of the immune engineering strategy. Peptides, because of their chemically defined nature, engineerability, and range of complexity, provide useful functionalities when designing strategies for vaccination, cancer immunotherapy, and the treatment of autoimmune disorders. This chapter will examine the peptide-based strategies for immune modulation in detail and discuss the promise and outstanding challenges facing the field of immune engineering.