Targeted delivery of vaccine to dendritic cells by chitosan nanoparticles conjugated with a targeting peptide ligand selected by phage display technique.

The paper presents a novel dendritic cells (DC)-targeting peptide, TPAFRYS (TP) identified by phage display technique and conjugated to chitosan in order to develop an efficient DC-targeting vaccine delivery carrier. TP-conjugated chitosan nanoparticles (TPC-NPs) were prepared with ovalbumin (OVA) as a model vaccine by ionic gelation. Flow cytometry and immunocytochemistry studies demonstrated the higher targeting ability of TPC-NPs to DCs in compared to chitosan NPs.