JAMA
December 8, 2010, Vol 304, No. 22, pp 2441-2548
http://jama.ama-assn.org/current.dtl

Lab, Field, & Clinic
Scientists Turn to Immune “Fingerprints” to Understand Vaccines, Infections
Bridget M. Kuehn

Extract
Despite the success of vaccines in preventing millions of deaths and serious illnesses each year, many mysteries remain about how they interact with the immune system to produce immunity. Similarly, an understanding of how the immune system responds to infection is limited.

As a result, important questions persist. For example, why are older adults less likely to develop protective immunity after vaccination? Why are some individuals susceptible to a particular infectious disease and others are less susceptible?

A new initiative hopes to catalogue the “fingerprints” of human immune responses (such as the production of antibodies) to vaccines or infectious agents.

To help answer such questions, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has launched its human immune phenotyping initiative, a $100-million effort that will be carried out at 6 institutions across the country. The participating centers will document and compare changes that occur in the immune system of …