Vaccines: no longer immune from development

Vaccines play a central role in health protection and advance in biotechnologies now offers numerous novel approaches for vaccine development. This situation must be exploited, says David Klatzmann of the CompuVac project, who expands on his work in standardising vaccine evaluation.

 The goal of developing new vaccines to immunise people against infectious diseases has long been a key priority for the world’s medical authorities. Edward Jenner’s work in developing the world’s first smallpox vaccine in the 1790’s demonstrated that it was possible to protect the general population from major threats to public health, and vaccine development aimed at combating the major concerns of the day has continued ever since. There have been many successes, and vaccines are now available to immunise people against a wide range of diseases, including measles, polyomyelitis, smallpox and tetanus.

However, the pace of vaccine development over time has been extremely uneven, and the need for a more systematic method of vaccine development has led directly to the development of the CompuVac (Rational Design and Standardised Evaluation of Novel Genetic Vaccines) project, an initiative which brings together 19 mainly European institutions in the search for a more effective approach to the issue.

The need for sophisticated new methods is made even more pressing by the modern advances in medical science which have established new parameters in vaccine development. Great advances have been made over recent times, advances which prompt Klatzmann to say that we are living through a particularly important period in the history of vaccine development. “Nowadays, people are realising that they can use virtually any type of virus or even bacteria to establish a platform for the expression of heterologous antigens and turn this into a vaccine. They can likewise use the ability of our body to respond to a certain virus or bacteria to make it respond to something else,” he explains. “So there is, in theory, an almost infinite number of potential vaccine platforms.”

CompuVac’s advanced technical expertise are also being applied to developing a standardised means of comparison. “Computer scientists are often not very well-informed about immunology, and many immunologists don’t know much about databases and all the specific things surrounding that. If there has been a breakthrough then this is it – it brings together people from two different worlds and makes them work together to generate a meaningful database.”

Contact Dr Adeline Lassaux, Scientific Manager, at alassaux@chups.jussieu.fr

Published: Monday, 9th November 2009

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