Intranasal vaccines offer key advantages over traditional needle-based vaccines. They are simple to administer and painless and establish local immunity at mucosal surfaces. Owing to these advantages, they are particularly attractive for use in resource-limited locations of the world. Subunit vaccines also have advantages for global distribution, as they can be engineered to be more stable to fluctuations in environmental conditions than live-attenuated or inactivated vaccines, but they tend to be poorly immunogenic intranasally. Toward realizing the potential of intranasal subunit vaccination, biomaterial-based technologies are emerging. This review provides an overview of recent progress in the preclinical development of biomaterial-based intranasal vaccines against subunit antigens and should serve as an effective introduction to the current state of this exciting field. We provide a brief overview of the obstacles facing intranasal vaccine development and identify key design criteria for consideration when designing biomaterials for intranasal subunit vaccine delivery. Promising strategies are discussed across a wide array of biomaterial classes, with a focus on selected exemplary works that highlight the considerable potential of intranasal vaccines and the biomaterial-based technologies that enable them.
Keywords: biomaterials; intranasal; nanoparticle; vaccine.