2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

The Human Vaccines Project: Transforming the Future of Vaccine Development

Infectious Disease: Monitoring and Response Vaccines are one of the most effective public health interventions in history, with dramatic successes in eradicating or controlling diseases such as smallpox, polio, and measles. Yet past strategies for vaccine development are unlikely to succeed against diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or cancers, where genetic diversity and immune evasion present significant challenges. Recent advances in genomics, computational and systems biology, and structural biology offer the potential to revolutionize vaccine development. A recent landmark meeting of 35 leading vaccine scientists considered how best to harness these advances and unanimously endorsed the vision for a Human Vaccines Project, a large-scale human immunology-based clinical research initiative focused on solving key scientific problems impeding vaccine development. The Human Vaccines Project, modeled on the Human Genome Project, aims to decipher the human immunome to create a roadmap of the “rules of immunogenicity” in humans. This work is predicated on huge datasets and bioinformatics to yield novel approaches to vaccine discovery and new methods for the induction of protective immune responses and to significantly increase the probability for success of next-generation vaccines. If successful, the project holds the potential to be transformational for global health by accelerating vaccine development for infectious diseases, cancers, and emerging diseases of the 21st century.