Using the power of innate immunoprofiling to understand vaccine design, infection, and immunity

Abstract

In the field of immunology, a systems biology approach is crucial to understanding the immune response to infection and vaccination considering the complex interplay between genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors. Significant progress has been made in understanding the innate immune response, including cell players and critical signaling pathways, but many questions remain unanswered, including how the innate immune response dictates host/pathogen responses and responses to vaccines. To complicate things further, it is becoming increasingly clear that the innate immune response is not a linear pathway but is formed from complex networks and interactions. To further our understanding of the crosstalk and complexities, systems-level analyses and expanded experimental technologies are now needed. In this review, we discuss the most recent immunoprofiling techniques and discuss systems approaches to studying the global innate immune landscape which will inform on the development of personalized medicine and innovative vaccine strategies.

Feasibility of Using a Type I IFN-Based Non-Animal Approach to Predict Vaccine Efficacy and Safety Profiles

“…Others have proposed the postvaccination immune signatures and signaling pathways of innate immunity that have been defined for the yellow fever and influenza vaccines described in this paper to be used for the optimization of vaccine design [ 108 , 174 ].…”

“…According to others, understanding prevaccination immune-regulatory environment and the availability of prevaccination immune indicators on responsiveness to the vaccine, particularly for certain categories of the population, is important to optimize vaccine design and identify molecular biomarkers to predict vaccine outcomes [ 108 , 174 ].…”

“…Systems vaccinology is an emerging field that applies systems biology approaches and predictive models to vaccinology and provides a powerful tool for studying vaccine immune response outcomes [ 108 ]. Over the past decade, several research groups have increasingly and successfully used this promising approach to identify molecular biomarkers to evaluate the efficacy and safety of vaccine immune responses associated with type I IFN signaling, as detailed below and illustrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4 .…”

“…This substantial difference could produce a significant variation in the extent of the measured immune signatures. The immune signature could also be substantially influenced by the heterogeneity of the human innate immune system [ 108 ]. This heterogeneity is caused by an individual variability in the development of some innate cells, such as DCs.…”

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

“…Connors et al 3 expand the breadth of this special issue by reviewing various methodologies employed to profile immune responses and the computational approaches to establish immunological landscapes. Their discussion focuses on how computational tools can deduct confounding factors such as baseline responses and aging that impact innate immunity and ultimately vaccine efficacy.…”