Components of a vaccine

Adjuvants:

Adjuvants are added to vaccines to stimulate the production of antibodies against the vaccine to make it more effective. Adjuvants have been used for decades to improve the immune respons to vaccine antigens, most often in inactivated (killed) vaccines. In conventional vaccines, adding adjuvants into vaccine formulations is very aimed at enhancing, accelerating and prolonging the specific immune response to vaccine antigens. Newly developed purified subunit or synthetic vaccines using biosynthetic, recombinant, and other modern technology are poor vaccine antigens and require adjuvants to provoke the desired immune response.

Chemically, adjuvants are highly heterogenous group of compounds with only one thing in common: their ability to enhance the immune response. They are highly variable in terms of how they affect the immune system and how serious their adverse reactions are, due to the resulting hyperactivation of the immune system.

Today there are several hundred different types of adjuvants that are being used or studied in vaccine technology.