The Current Status of Virus-like Particles

Virus-like particles (VLPs) are shell-like-structures but without the viral genome. VLPs mimic the antigenicity of parental virus or subviral particles (SVPs). As effective immunogens, characterized by high immunogenicity and safety, VLPs have been for candidate vaccines. Depending on the complexity of capsid proteins, like parental viruses, VLPs can be monolayered non-enveloped, multilayered non-enveloped or enveloped. They can form upon the expression of one or several viral structural proteins in a recombinant heterologous system. They can be produced in a prokaryotic, eukaryotic or some other expression systems using target-encoding recombinant vectors. Here, this article reviews the current status of VLPs as a new generation of vaccines.