The Fifth Vaccine Renaissance took place in Providence Rhode Island in October 2011. This annual conference celebrates regional vaccine research and provides vaccine developers with an important opportunity to present their work to others who might be in slightly different fields, enabling the development of cross-disciplinary collaborations. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics has been a media sponsor of the event for each of the past five conferences. Due to its small size (100 participants on average), the meeting also affords new investigators and graduate students with an important opportunity to speak to more experienced vaccine researchers and to be mentored by them. During the 4th conference, animal vaccine researchers were encouraged to participate and present; the 5th conference featured an entire track on animal vaccine development. Thus two of the articles in this Special Section provide a window on activities in that field. The field of emerging infectious diseases, global health, and biodefense are all well represented at the conference as is demonstrated by three articles in this Special Section.
The next Vaccine Renaissance Conference will take place on October 15th to 17th in Providence Rhode Island. Biodefense and Neglected Tropical Diseases are the key themes for 2012. Visit www.immunome.org/ for more information on the participants and speakers. We are delighted that the journal Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics has again agreed to publish a Special Section featuring a selection of papers prepared by speakers of this year’s VRVI conference. We aim to publish the next Special Section in the spring of 2013. We look forward to the exciting talks and high impact papers that will emerge from this sixth gathering of vaccine developers in Providence.