Innovations Advancing Vaccine Preparedness and Response Capabilities to Counter Pandemic Influenza

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically demonstrated the power of rapidly developed and highly effective vaccines in mitigating disease burden and societal disruption. While the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 was unforeseen, influenza pandemics are a certainty. Vaccination will be the cornerstone of public health efforts to protect the health of the population from pandemic influenza. The unprecedented investments in COVID-19 vaccine development, production, distribution, and administration have yielded major advancements in applied vaccine science and technology. These advancements present a unique opportunity to transform our current pandemic vaccine portfolios and effectively combat the next pandemic threat, protecting national health security.

This Special Issue invites original contributions that propose or demonstrate innovations across the entire target product profile of candidate influenza vaccines. These innovations aim to surpass currently available vaccines in key metrics such as efficacy, durability, breadth of protection, development speed, adaptability, and ease of administration. We are particularly interested in novel vaccine candidates leveraging "platform technologies" (e.g., nucleic acid, recombinant proteins, viral vectors) that can significantly expedite the development timeline for pandemic vaccines from initial sequence identification to regulatory approval and mass deployment.

We welcome submissions around the following topics of interest:

• New vaccine mechanisms of action, high efficacy, and safety.
• Seasonal vaccines with potential to convey some level of immunity to an emerging zoonotic influenza virus.
• Manufacturing platform speed, yield, and capacity.
• Clinical trial acceleration and correlates of protection.
• Enabling technologies and strategies, including the following:
  • New or improved immune assays to support product development;
  • New or improved assays to understand antigenic drift and escape from vaccine immunity.
• Accessibility, impact, and sustainability, including the following:
  • Single-dose regimens;
  • Alternative routes of administration;
  • Vaccine uptake.

Dr. Ruben Donis
Dr. Sam Lee
Dr. Christine Oshansky
Dr. Leah Watson
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Vaccines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• influenza vaccines
• efficacy
• vaccine uptake
• rapid manufacturing
• vaccine mechanism of action
• alternative routes of administration
• single-dose regimens