Solid phase peptide synthesis of lipopeptide vaccines eliciting epitope-specific B-, T-helper and T-killer cell response.

Lymphocyte subpopulations involved in the self and nonself recognition processes are antibody producing cells, T-helper cells and T-killer cells. By using lipopeptide adjuvants and lipopeptide-antigen conjugates each of the major pathways of immune response can be specifically addressed on the molecular level of minimized synthetic lipopeptide vaccines. The immunologically active principle of the lipopeptide constructs is the synthetic N-terminus of bacterial lipoprotein, tri-palmitoyl-S-glycerylcysteine, which can be covalently linked to B-, T-helper and CTL epitopes. Methods of multiple peptide synthesis based on Merrifield's solid-phase synthesis allow the economic production of the high numbers of overlapping lipopeptides required for the complete immunological screening of viral proteins.