Considerations for vaccine design in the postgenomic era

Abstract

The foundations of vaccination were laid in the eighteenth century by Edward Jenner and in the nineteenth century by Louis Pasteur. During the 1930s and 1940s, live attenuated and inactivated vaccines dominated the field. This was followed by the purification of antigens from pathogens grown in culture using biochemical methods, bringing the era of subunit vaccines to the fore. With the explosion in next-generation sequencing technologies and the availability first genomes, the field of reverse vaccinology alongside the associated “omics”-revolutions became of age. This allowed for the identification of promising antigens, not previously exploited for their protective abilities. By combining the latter technologies with immunogenetics and immunogenomics, insight into the immune response during infection/vaccination is providing a global picture of the various factors involved in protective immunity. In this post-genomic era, vaccine development is moving away from a trial-and-error approach to a knowledge-based vaccine development approach.