What Are Adjuvants?

One of the strategies to improve the immune response or to make the available number of doses go farther is to use an adjuvant. An adjuvant is a material that is mixed in the syringe or in the manufacturing process with the actual vaccine protein, which we call the antigen, And it increases the immune response by in essence turning on additional signals of the immune system to lead to better immune response production. So adjuvants have been approved for use for many years…in the U.S. there's only one approved adjuvant, aluminum salts… In europe there are other approved adjuvants.