Comprehensive immunoprofiling and systematic adjuvant comparisons for identifying suitable vaccine: Adjuvant pairings

Abstract

Adjuvants are critical components of vaccines that enhance the host immune response to the vaccine antigen, however, only a small number of adjuvants are used in vaccines approved for human use. This is in part due to the slow process of novel adjuvants advancing from preclinical models to human studies, and modest mechanistic insights obtained using standard immunological methods to justify selection of a particular adjuvant for clinical evaluation. Here, we discuss several aspects of current adjuvant research and strategies to better assess the complex pathways triggered by adjuvant candidates that can increase adjuvanticity and vaccine efficacy while minimizing reactogenicity. We propose a more systematic use of broad immunoprofiling, coupled with data integration using computational and mathematical modeling. This comprehensive evaluation of the host immune response will facilitate the selection of the most appropriate adjuvant for a vaccine, ultimately leading to the expeditious evaluation of novel adjuvants for vaccines against emerging infectious diseases, which will prove especially valuable during a pandemic where speed is of the essence when developing vaccines.

Immunomodulatory Peptides as Vaccine Adjuvants and Antimicrobial Agents

“…In addition, some of the most relevant targets are plotted in Figure 11 . It is proposed that the new adjuvant fingerprints should be compared to a benchmark adjuvant [ 40 ]. We used an alum adjuvant (aluminum hydroxide) as the reference for comparison.…”

“…The docking analysis and systems biology combination can be applied to validate the first steps of vaccine development [ 105 ]. It is proposed to pair each adjuvant with the corresponding antigen to define adjuvanticity in vivo markers and perform immune profiling to select the optimal adjuvant for each antigen in the vaccine [ 40 ].…”

Editorial to special issue “The power of immunoprofiling supported by computational data integration and machine learning”

“…While such results do inform on the immunogenicity of vaccine formulations, they frequently fail to predict the protective efficacy of a vaccine. Even in the process of down-selecting adjuvants for a vaccine such readout methods are insufficient as discussed by Vázquez-Maldonado et al 2 …”