Amy Guip

Key Concepts

• Vaccines are extremely effective at preventing disease, but they could work better, for more people and against a wider variety of illnesses.
• Advances in immunology have revealed how new classes of “adjuvants”—ingredients that stimulate immune responses to vaccines—can allow vaccine designers to target specific populations and pathogens.
• Novel adjuvants can make existing vaccines more effective and make previously impossible vaccines a reality.

The thought of birth defects caused by rubella, rows of iron lungs housing children crippled by polio, or the horrific sound of a baby struggling with whooping cough can still evoke dread among people who have seen firsthand the damage inflicted by these and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Fortunately, those scourges are virtually unknown to modern generations that have had access to vaccines all their lives.

For more than 200 years vaccines have proved to be one of the most successful, lifesaving and economical methods of preventing infectious disease, second only to the sanitization of water. Vaccines have spared millions of people from early death or crippling illnesses and made the global eradication of smallpox in 1979 possible. Health experts now pledge to eliminate polio, measles and perhaps one day even malaria—although, as we shall see, a malaria vaccine will require novel approaches to immunization to be successful.

   
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