Hiding in Plain Sight – Vaccines against Highly Variable Pathogens

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

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Vaccines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

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.

• B cell
• T cell
• immunogenicity
• immunodominance
• immune-focusing
• viral immunology
• parasite immunology
• antigenic variation
• vaccines
• bio-engineering