Vaccine Immunogenetics: Bedside to Bench to Population

Tuesday, 21st of January 2014

[source]Vaccine[|source]

A variety of factors impact the heterogeneity of vaccine-induced immune responses. Some of these include gender, vaccine dose, the integrity of vaccine storage and cold chain maintenance, immune system function and integrity, age, body mass index, and others. Put simply, the response to a vaccine is the cumulative result of interactions driven by a host of genes and their interactions.

In this article, the authors illustrated important preliminary associations between measles vaccine immune responses and class I and class II HLA alleles, HLA supertypes and HLA haplotypes, SLAM and CD46 receptor SNPs, cytokine and cytokine receptor, TLR and MyD88 SNPs. The authors in addition illustrated that almost 90% of measles vaccine immune response heterogeneity was explainable genetically. More details are available at:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614670/

 

Abstract

The immunogenetic basis for variations in immune response to vaccines in humans remains largely unknown. Many factors can contribute to the heterogeneity of vaccine-induced immune responses, including polymorphisms of immune response genes. It is important to identify those genes involved directly or indirectly in the generation of the immune response to vaccines. Our previous work with measles reveals the impact of immune response gene polymorphisms on measles vaccine-induced humoral and cellular immune responses. We demonstrate associations between genetic variation (single nucleotide polymorphisms-SNPs) in HLA class I and class II genes, cytokine, cell surface receptor, and Toll-like receptor genes and variations in immune responses to measles vaccine. Such information may provide further understanding of genetic restrictions that influence the generation of protective immune responses to vaccines, and eventually the development of new vaccines.