Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of single-stranded RNAs with covalently closed structures. Owing to their not having 3' or 5' ends, circRNAs are highly durable and insusceptible to exonuclease-mediated degradation. Moreover, some circRNAs with certain structures are translatable, making them novel vaccines. Vaccines are efficient tools for immunotherapy, such as for the prevention of infectious diseases and cancer treatment. The immune system is activated during immunotherapy to fight against abnormal allies or invaders. CircRNA vaccines represent a potential new avenue in the vaccine era. Recently, several circRNA vaccines have been synthesized and tested in vitro and in vivo. Our review briefly introduces the current understanding of the biology and function of translatable circRNAs, molecular biology, synthetic methods, delivery of circRNA, and current circRNA vaccines. We also discussed the challenges and future directions in the field by summarizing the developments in circRNA vaccines in the past few years.
Keywords: circular RNA; drug delivery; immunotherapy; vaccine.
© 2023 Jindong Xie, Fengxi Ye, Xinpei Deng, Yuhui Tang, Jie-Ying Liang, Xufeng Huang, Yuying Sun, Hailin Tang, Jinsong Lei, Shaoquan Zheng, Yutian Zou, published by De Gruyter on behalf of Scholar Media Publishing.