An expert in vaccinology spoke about her work regarding new ways to study vaccines Tuesday at the Lehman Auditorium in the Science and Engineering Hall.
Nadine Rouphael, the executive director and professor of vaccinology and infectious diseases at Emory University, discussed system vaccinology, a new method of studying vaccines that promotes more exact and personalized immunization, that she and her team have been developing. The event was hosted by the GW Vaccine Research Unit and was part of a series called “State of the Art: Topics in Vaccinology” centered around the field of vaccinology, the study of vaccines.
Rouphael said she wanted the audience, which consisted of GW students and professors, to think about vaccines “beyond” the traditional methods of antigen and antibody vaccination — a vaccine with an inactive or altered form of the virus — which has been the traditional method of vaccination for decades. She said the new methods of immunization that she has been studying, system vaccinology — where scientists analyze a subjects’s genetic response to a vaccine to better the immunization — will be one of the most “transformative” public health tools in history because it will enable the medical field to move toward a more personalized vaccine.
“I will be focusing my talk on system vaccinology, a field that, through the power of transcriptomics, metabolomics and immune profiling, has the possibility to reveal new insights into how vaccines work and how we can make them better,” Rouphael said.
Rouphael said the process of system vaccinology is “simple,” as they begin by administering the vaccine using different “routes of administration” and different types of vaccine. She said blood is then collected to study cellular immunity over the many days following immunization.
She said this framework to studying vaccines will be able to specifically tailor vaccines to vulnerable populations and can make them safer and more effective. Rouphael said system vaccinology will allow researchers to test and optimize vaccines before they enter large scale clinical trials.
“This framework will allow us to shift from a trial and error process, that is, to one that is predictive and efficient and data driven,” Rouphael said.
Rouphael said she sought to understand the diversity in genes as well as the environmental factors that contribute to a person’s genetic makeup, in order to predict immune responses to vaccines and produce a better immunization. She said it is possible to understand this because of the data scientists are able to collect through testing, as she said anything one could “ever imagine” that is measurable in the immune system can be measured.
“System vaccinology offers the potential to move to a more personalized preventive medicine, tailoring vaccines and strategy based on the individual unique immune response,” Rouphael said.
Rouphael said although system vaccinology helps scientists understand the “fundamental mechanism” of vaccine response, she and her team thought the system had potential to be helpful in a clinical setting because it will help scientists better tailor vaccines to a specific person or population.
Rouphael said this research involved 13 research centers that looked at 3,000 samples from 800 adults who took part in 28 vaccine studies. She said researchers believe that the system vaccinology method will help vaccine studies move faster in the future by looking at the immune response in the first week to help decide which vaccine candidate moves forward.
“We feel this is a much more data driven objective method to be able to quickly screen vaccines,” Rouphael said.
