Dear reader,
The Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics Editorial Team would like to wish you a happy and successful year 2017.
As we look back on 2016, we appreciate the excellent and timely work performed by hundreds of expert peer Reviewers, without which we could not have maintained the requisite quality of our journal. We thank all of our Reviewers, and hope to be able to engage them in future reviews. We are delighted to announce that Dr. Rebecca Perkins is selected as 2016 Reviewer-of-the-Year (p 2).
The first issue of this year starts with a Portrait of Dr. John Oxford, a virologist at Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, London, UK (p 11), and a Profile of the biotech company Immune Design (p 15).
We are pleased to introduce a Special Focus on Vaccine Delivery Systems. An introduction to the field and to the articles in this section is provided by the Guest Editor Dr. Ryan Donnelly of Queen's University, Belfast, UK (p 17).
In the Influenza section you will find five research articles on seasonal vaccine coverage in Chinese children (Hu, p 75), cost-effectiveness of 3- and 4-valent vaccines in Taiwan (Yang, p 81), effects of adjuvanted pandemic vaccine on the central nervous system (Planty, p 90), vaccine uptake among the elderly in Brazil (Bof de Andrade, p 103), and safety of Vero cell-adapted vaccine strains (Ma, p 111).
Six articles on Licensed Vaccines include an analysis of the long-term immunogenicity of measles vaccine in Italy (Gallone, p 117), an assessment of immunogenicity and safety of DTPa-HBV-IPV/Hib vaccine in Indian infants (Lalwani, p 120), safety trials of Tdap vaccine administered to pregnant women (Villarreal-Perez, p 128) and healthy adults in Thailand (Sirivichayakul, p 136), immunogenicity and safety study of the purified Vero cell rabies vaccine in older adults (Wang, p 144), and a meeting report from the 26th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (Esposito, p 151).
The Novel Vaccines section presents a review of the clinical development of Ebola vaccines (Wang, p 153), a characterization of the transcriptome in response to live-attenuated Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus vaccine (Erwin-Cohen, p 169), and two commentaries on advances in combination subunit vaccine development (Tan, p 180) and development of coronavirus vaccines (Ng, p 186).
Two articles on Public Health include a study of the impact of the economic crisis on preschool vaccination coverage in Greece (Georgakopoulou, p 190) and an analysis of Italian healthcare workers’ vaccine attitudes (Scatigna, p 198).
A research article investigates factors associated with influenza and pneumococcal vaccine Acceptance among American adults (Kaljee, p), and a commentary discusses personalized approaches to adult vaccine uptake (Alici, p 213).
Two research articles on Pneumococcal vaccines investigate the impact on invasive disease in HIV patients in Israel (Chowers, p 216) and chemically detoxified pneumolysin as a candidate vaccine (Hermand, p 220).
Finally, we introduce a review on rational HIV vaccine design (van Haaren, p 229), a study of responses to the adventitious porcine circovirus type 1 in infants vaccinated with Rotavirus vaccine (Han, p 237), and a commentary on local delivery of checkpoint inhibitor Immunotherapy (Wang, p 249).
Our monthly News, Policy and Profiles (NP&P) track offers a selection of the latest news in the field of vaccines and immunotherapeutics. In this section we also regularly publish opinion pieces on timely, interesting and controversial topics related to vaccines and immunotherapeutics, profiles of companies and organizations, as well as portraits of distinguished scientists in our field. Please contact Acquisitions Editor Adam Weiss ( [email protected]) with your ideas for commentaries, opinion pieces, profiles and portraits. Your suggestions for and contributions to our N&P&P track are always welcome!
Sincerely,
Ronald Ellis, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Adam Weiss, PhD
Acquisitions Editor