PNAS – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/
(Accessed 6 February 2016)

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Commentary
Systems vaccinology informs influenza vaccine immunogenicity
Adolfo García-Sastrea,1
Author Affiliations
Extract
Vaccines are the most efficient way to control and eradicate infectious diseases. The smallpox vaccine has led to the eradication of variola virus, which has been the cause of a high number of human casualties for many years in the not so distant past. Other viral vaccines that have not yet led to eradication, but have remarkably reduced the burden of viral infections, are the poliovirus, measles virus, mump virus, rubella virus, and yellow fever virus vaccines. More recently, the development of hepatitis B virus, chicken pox, zoster, rotavirus, and human papilloma virus vaccines have highlighted the impact of modern vaccines in controlling viral infections, including those involved in cancer development. Nevertheless, there is room for the improvement of several existing viral vaccines, such as the influenza and dengue virus vaccines, and challenges in the generation of effective vaccines against some specific viruses, including respiratory syncytial virus, several herpesviruses, and HIV. It also might be possible to generate effective vaccines against emergent viral infections, including chikungunya, Hendra, Nipah, Zika, and ebolaviruses, but difficulties include the need for large and costly studies to assess vaccine efficacy and the unpredictability of where the next human infections with such emerging pathogens will occur. Another major scientific challenge in the development of novel and improved virus vaccines is that, despite the previous successes in vaccine development, based on studies assessing whether a vaccine is safe and efficacious, no definitive studies have exposed the immunological mechanisms associated with vaccine efficacy. Thus, we still do not know for the most part how vaccines work. Challenges include limitations associated with animal models and difficulties to access informative human samples from multiple tissues. In this respect, the application of systems biology tools to the study of human vaccines (so-called “systems vaccinology”) gives new hope for the elucidation of the mechanistic details associated with vaccine safety and efficacy. In PNAS, Nakaya et al. (1) use systems vaccinology to find new clues on the immunogenic and transcriptional networks that are associated with robust influenza vaccine responses correlated with protection.