Biomarkers of vaccine immunity identified

Testing the efficacy of vaccines in clinical trials takes years, even decades. Yet, challenging infections like HIV, malaria and dengue are striking today. To speed up vaccine testing, scientists at the Emory Vaccine Center have established a goal of creating a “vaccine gene chip.” This device could read the activity of all the genes in the genome in white blood cells within a few days of administration of a test vaccine. Reading such molecular signatures would rapidly help predict the ability of that vaccine to stimulate the immune system and protect against disease. Now scientists led by Bali Pulendran, PhD have taken an important step toward making such a chip, by comparing the molecular signatures induced by five very different vaccines in the immune systems of human volunteers. The results are published online in Nature Immunology. Pulendran, senior author of the paper, is Charles Howard Candler professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at...