Precision and Personalized Medicine

Personalized Vaccinology

The goal in vaccinology is to discover, develop, and deploy highly immunogenic and safe vaccines that protect against infectious and non-infectious (i.e., cancers) diseases in essentially 100% of the population. While admirable, such a goal, to date, fails because of both pathogen and host variability. For hyper-variable viral pathogens like HIV, HCV, rhinovirus, and others, we have been unable to discover and develop highly immunogenic and protective vaccine candidates. This is true too for other highly complex pathogens such as bacteria (i.e., tuberculosis) and parasites (i.e., malaria). Host variability is evident in the multiplicity of immune response genes that encode >1012 products necessary for generating immune responses (i.e., antibodies, T cell receptors [TCRs], etc.), and the estimated diversity of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) haplotypes (estimated at >1013), allowing humans an almost limitless immune response capability.