Rational vaccine design to combat infectious diseases requires the identification of potential immune correlates of protection. This involves mapping the antigen-specificity, phenotype and function of pathogen-specific responses in protected versus non-protected vaccine recipients. The quest for correlates of protective immunity has primarily been hampered by the complexity of immune responses elicited by infection and vaccination. While there are benchmarks associated with a lower risk of infection for many licensed vaccines, the true immune correlates remain largely unknown. The classic assessments of immunogenicity, such as measuring antibody titers or frequency of T cells that produce certain cytokines, often fails to accurately predict protective immunity. This special issue of intends to provide a platform for reports that demonstrate the power of immunoprofiling of innate and adaptive immune responses in revealing immune correlates of protection for vaccines. These efforts include strategies to broadly phenotype protective vs. non-protective immune responses, system serology, and transcriptomics, but also computational tools for data integration, such as machine learning, to identify complex immunological fingerprints induced by vaccines.
The following topics are of special interest:
- Power of data integration of a wide range of immune measures to establish immune profiles of disease, infection, protection and failure of individual assumed measurements to forecast susceptibility and protection.
- Immunoprofiling/quest for immune correlates of protection (each would be at least one review from investigators)
- Bacterial diseases
- Viral diseases
- Parasitic diseases
- Chronic diseases and therapeutic vaccines
- Influence of adjuvants
- Immunoprofiling in cancer immunotherapy
- Comparison of immune profiles established for disease relevant preclinical and clinical models
- Effect of age on the immune profile
- Identification of biomarkers of disease based on immune profiling
- Based on serology/cell phenotypes
- Based on functional immunoprofile
Biological validation of computational tools
