Hiding in Plain Sight – Vaccines against Highly Variable Pathogens
A special issue of Vaccines (ISSN 2076-393X). This special issue belongs to the section "Therapeutic Vaccines and Antibody Therapeutics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 418
Special Issue Editors
Interests: antibody; B cell; immunodominance; influenza; viral immunity; immune memory; humoral immunity
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Vaccination has driven tremendous gains in public health. However, vaccines against highly variable pathogens, those infectious agents able to generate and tolerate rapid change, have proved either difficult to obtain (e.g., HIV, Hepatitis C), poorly protective (e.g., malaria), or requiring constant redesign and readministration (e.g., influenza). Many pathogens display incredible capacity to change their antigenic surface in order to escape immune recognition. This facilitates the sequential or contemporaneous circulation of variant strains and drives viral evolution favoring variants able to concentrate immune focus onto readily changeable epitopes, to the detriment of responses against conserved regions. In order to unlock pathways to vastly improved vaccines, critical knowledge gaps need to be addressed, including but not limited to:
- A mechanistic understanding of how the immune system hierarchically recognizes and responds to antigens (i.e., immunogenicity and immunodominance);
- Strategies to rationally design and/or engineer vaccine immunogens to maximize the conservation or display of highly conserved, protective epitopes (i.e., immune-focusing);
- Strategies to selectively promote and/or maintain highly cross-reactive B- and T-cell responses for broad and durable protection.
This Special Issue will cover the most recent advances and outstanding challenges surrounding immunity and vaccine development against variable viruses, parasites, and bacteria. Importantly, this Issue aims to incorporate diverse perspectives from specialists in immunology; vaccinology; bio-engineering; structural biology; bacterial, viral, or parasite immunology; and more.
Dr. Davide Angeletti
Dr. Adam Wheatley
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- B cell
- T cell
- immunogenicity
- immunodominance
- immune-focusing
- viral immunology
- parasite immunology
- antigenic variation
- vaccines
- bio-engineering
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