Carrier diversity and chemical ligations in the toolbox for designing tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACAs) as synthetic vaccine candidates.

This review highlights the recent development in the use of carriers of increasing simplicities and versatile chemical ligation processes leading to synthetic vaccine candidates against tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACAs). After briefly covering their structures, functions, occurrence, and biosynthesis, an overview of common conjugation chemistry is described with an emphasis on the versatile alkenyl glycosides as starting materials toward glycoconjugate syntheses. This is followed by a successive description of the numerous scaffolds and carriers used to progressively improve and simplify glycovaccine formulations. Throughout a systematic investigation of the various architectures involved, a critical description of the basic principles discovered en route to effective immune responses is disclosed wherein it is found that size, shape, densities, and carriers are all key factors involved towards successful vaccines.