Garnet Navarro, PhD, Kathleen Kennedy, PhD, and Tetyana Stolyar, PhD
Researchers from the ISB lab of Co-founder and Director Alan Aderem and Emory University have developed an approach involving immunology, genomics and bioinformatics to predict the ability of a vaccine in generating a long-term, effective immune response. This approach addresses a long-standing challenge in vaccine development: how to determine new vaccine effectiveness without exposing test subjects to potentially harmful or lethal infection.
The groundbreaking study, using the yellow fever vaccine as a model, was published recently in Nature Immunology.
The yellow fever vaccine (YF-17D), one of the most successful ever developed, has been administered to nearly 500 million people over the last 70 years. Researchers collaborated to determine what makes YF-17D so effective and thus help scientists design new vaccines against global pandemics and emerging infections.
Using yellow fever to identify physiological responses to vaccination that precede a strong and enduring immune response, they vaccinated 15 healthy individuals and studied
Researchers were able to predict, with up to 90 percent accuracy, which of the vaccinated individuals would develop strong immunity to yellow fever.
ISB and Emory researchers now want to see if this approach can be used to predict the effectiveness of other vaccines. The ability to successfully predict their immunity and effectiveness could enable the rapid development of new and effective vaccines, and help identify patients at risk of not developing protective immunity even with vaccination.
Funding for this study was provided in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the U19 Cooperative Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense program.
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