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Rules to 'prime' by

Nature Immunology volume 10, pages 14–16 (2009)Cite this article

A systems biology approach provides correlates of successful vaccination, which allows a new method for measuring early vaccine efficiency and suggests hypotheses for the mechanisms that underlie immunogenicity.

Vaccines are at the leading edge of the great success story of evidence-based medicine. Through the twentieth century, medical and basic scientists working in both academia and industry developed the spectrum of familiar products that serve to minimize the toll levied by infections such as whooping cough, poliomyelitis and measles, particularly in the pediatric population. The possibility of finding some way to define the key, early correlates of vaccination—the 'molecular' language that defines the initial parameters for later development of optimum protective immune memory—would be an enormously valuable tool whose realization has thus far proven a considerable challenge. Being able to 'read out' such information could, for example, allow the development of rapid tests for determining whether a person has responded effectively to a vaccine within a short window after the initial dosing. This would be of particular value when priming health care workers or other first responders during an emerging outbreak and would also contribute to the goal of rational vaccine design by allowing the delineation of essential host response components that boost vaccine 'take'. In this issue of Nature Immunology, Pulendran and colleagues use a systems biology approach to build such a tool, a predictive algorithm of yellow fever vaccine immunogenicity1. Developed in 1937 at the old Rockefeller Institute, Max Theiler's 17D yellow fever vaccine is perhaps the most successful immunogen ever made in a laboratory2. Now, 70 years later, Pulendran and colleagues find that 17D induces a small number of early transcriptional shifts that have powerful predictive value for the amount of ensuing immune memory in humans.

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Figure 1: Application of DAMIP to yellow fever vaccine trials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paul G. Thomas is in the Department of Immunology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee 38105, USA.,

    Paul G Thomas

  2. Peter C. Doherty is in the Department of Immunology, and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee 38105, USA, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. peter.doherty@stjude.org,

    Peter C Doherty

Authors
  1. Paul G Thomas
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  2. Peter C Doherty
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Thomas, P., Doherty, P. Rules to 'prime' by. Nat Immunol 10, 14–16 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ni0109-14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ni0109-14

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