2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Designer Vaccines: Revealing the Latest Trends in Bacterial and Viral Warfare

Nothing aids the prevention of viral or bacterial infections quite as well as a vaccine. Despite decades of progress, many devastating diseases have defied vaccine developers. Scientific and technological breakthroughs in structural biology, genetics, and bioinformatics are changing this. Designers of the next generation of vaccines are using brilliant synchrotron light to peer into the detailed structure of organisms to inform vaccine design, engineering the immune response to exploit our natural defenses, and sequencing a pathogen’s genome to screen for vaccine targets. Developments have led to breakthroughs in life-saving vaccines for devastating diseases such as meningitis, polio, and hand, foot, and mouth and been named as a runner-up for the 2013 Science Breakthrough of the Year, and in the World Health Organization’s Decade of Vaccines initiative. This symposium brings together internationally acclaimed researchers leading this research to discuss scientific developments and implications on a global level.