Gabriel Kristian Pedersen
Statens Serum Institut, Denmark
Title: Targeted delivery in rational vaccine design
Biography
Biography: Gabriel Kristian Pedersen
Abstract
Novel vaccine strategies include the so-called subunit vaccines, which encompass only the part of the pathogen to which immune recognition results in protection. The high purity of these vaccines makes adverse events less likely, but it also makes the vaccines less immunogenic and therefore potentially less effective. Vaccine adjuvants that increase and modulate the immunogenicity of the vaccine are therefore added to solve this problem. Besides aluminum salts, which have been used in vaccines for 90 years, a number of novel vaccine adjuvants include delivery systems like liposomes and emulsions have been included in licensed vaccines over the last 30 years. However trial-and-error has been the explorative approach of choice, for the design of novel vaccine adjuvants due to major gaps in the knowledge about immunological activation processes. Increasing insight into immunological mechanisms and how to manipulate them has replaced empirical with rational design of adjuvants, leading to vaccine adjuvants with increased and customized immunogenicity profiles without compromising vaccine safety. I will present an overview of where vaccine adjuvant research is today. I will furthermore show an example where the newest knowledge in innate immunology enables the rational design of a novel CTL inducing vaccine adjuvant.