Bioinformatics for Vaccinology

Exordium

Vaccines: A Very, Very Short Introduction

Bioinformatics for Vaccinology addresses the newly emergent discipline of immunoinformatics, specifically in the context of high-throughput immunology, or immunomics, and the design and discovery of vaccines. As the science of bioinformatics, the application of informatics techniques to biological macromolecules, has grown, matured and deepened, so novel subdisciplines have begun to emerge within it. Immunoinformatics, the application of informatics techniques to molecules of the immune system, is one of the most exciting of these newly emergent disciplines.

One of the principal goals of immunoinformatics is to help develop computeraided vaccine design, or computational vaccinology, and to apply it to the search for new or enhanced vaccines. The identification of novel vaccine targets through in silico genomic analysis has great potential in the fight against disease. The pivotal challenge for immunoinformatics, at least as applied to vaccines, is the prediction of immunogenicity, be that at the level of epitope, subunit vaccine or attenuated pathogen. As the veracity of in silico predictions improves, so subsequent experimental work will become ever faster, ever more efficient and, ultimately, ever more successful; and that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about.

Vaccines are a good idea; a really, really good idea. The great French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) said: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent ...