Allergen 3-D Structure-Based Design of Future Vaccines for Specific Allergy Vaccination

Abstract

The history of specific allergy vaccination is long, and through all these years opinions and attitudes towards the treatment have been changeable. Likewise changeable has been the terms describing the treatment: allergen hyposentisisation, specific immunotherapy, specific allergy vaccination. The inconsistency is reflected also in the models concerning the underlying immunological mechanisms. Serum antibody analyses were performed as early as 1960, even before the discovery of IgE, searching for markers of successful therapy. Few years later the ’blocking IgG’hypothesis was forwarded [1] and for the following twenty years the immunological mechanism of successful immunotherapy was thought to include the induction of circulating allergen specific immunoglobulins capable of blocking the interaction between IgE and allergen. A disturbing problem, however, was the time delay of 4 to 6 months between the appearance of relatively high concentrations of allergen specific immunoglobulin, mainly of the IgG₄ type, and the clinical improvement of the patient.