Personalized vaccines: the emerging field of vaccinomics

Abstract

The next ‘golden age’ in vaccinology will be ushered in by the new science of vaccinomics. In turn, this will inform and allow the development of personalized vaccines, based on our increasing understanding of immune response phenotype: genotype information. Rapid advances in developing such data are already occurring for hepatitis B, influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, anthrax and smallpox vaccines. In addition, newly available data suggest that some vaccine-related adverse events may also be genetically determined and, therefore, predictable. This paper reviews the basis and logic of personalized vaccines, and describes recent advances in the field.

Keywords::

• gene association studies
• gene polymorphism
• HLA
• immunogenetics
• single nucleotide polymorphisms
• vaccinomics

Acknowledgments

We thank CA Hart for her editorial assistance. In addition we acknowledge support from National Institutes of Health grants AI 33144, AI 48793 and AI 40065 for this work.