Vaccine Design Strategies: Pathogens to Genomes

Abstract

Vaccines are undoubtedly one of the great triumphs of medical science. The global eradication of smallpox, once one of the most devastating infectious diseases of humankind, and the extensive control of various other infectious diseases bear testimony to the efficacy of vaccines. Much of this success employed classical vaccine designs, namely live attenuated vaccines as used for smallpox, measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), the BCG tuberculosis vaccine and the Sabin polio vaccine, and inactivated vaccines such as the Salk polio vaccine. Since then, subunit vaccines based on isolated macromolecules, including toxoid vaccines against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis and conjugate vaccines against several forms of bacterial meningitis, have been developed. The advent of recombinant DNA technology and the first recombinant protein vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine introduced in the 1980s, heralded a paradigm shift in vaccine design – no longer was it necessary to culture the pathogen. This millennium saw the introduction of recombinant protein vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV) and meningitis B (MenB). Despite these successes, the persistence of malaria, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C along with the emergence of novel zoonotic infections such as the devastating outbreaks of Ebola virus disease and the coronavirus outbreaks, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and Covid-19, serve as a reminder of the need for new vaccine technologies. At the forefront of this are recombinant vector vaccines and nucleic acid vaccines supported by dedicated bioinformatics tools. This chapter provides an overview of the immunology of vaccines and the range of vaccine design strategies currently being employed.