Hiding in Plain Sight – Vaccines against Highly Variable Pathogens

Dear Colleagues,

Vaccination has driven tremendous gains in public health. However, vaccines against highly variable pathogens, those infectious agents able to generate and tolerate rapid change, have proved either difficult to obtain (e.g., HIV, Hepatitis C), poorly protective (e.g., malaria), or requiring constant redesign and readministration (e.g., influenza). Many pathogens display incredible capacity to change their antigenic surface in order to escape immune recognition. This facilitates the sequential or contemporaneous circulation of variant strains and drives viral evolution favoring variants able to concentrate immune focus onto readily changeable epitopes, to the detriment of responses against conserved regions. In order to unlock pathways to vastly improved vaccines, critical knowledge gaps need to be addressed, including but not limited to:

• A mechanistic understanding of how the immune system hierarchically recognizes and responds to antigens (i.e., immunogenicity and immunodominance);
• Strategies to rationally design and/or engineer vaccine immunogens to maximize the conservation or display of highly conserved, protective epitopes (i.e., immune-focusing);
• Strategies to selectively promote and/or maintain highly cross-reactive B- and T-cell responses for broad and durable protection.

This Special Issue will cover the most recent advances and outstanding challenges surrounding immunity and vaccine development against variable viruses, parasites, and bacteria. Importantly, this Issue aims to incorporate diverse perspectives from specialists in immunology; vaccinology; bio-engineering; structural biology; bacterial, viral, or parasite immunology; and more. 

Dr. Davide Angeletti
Dr. Adam Wheatley
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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