Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 51st Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : July 03, 2024 - July 05, 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the significance of vaccines as pivotal medical countermeasures against infectious disease crises. The implementation of novel platforms, such as RNA technology, has ushered in a new era of vaccine R&D with remarkable achievements within a 300-day timeframe. The rapid development of the RNA vaccines underscored the critical need for a high-throughput platform that integrates interdisciplinary technologies encompassing Virology, Immunology, Structural Biology, Computational Sciences, and more, to identify key vaccine antigens and to apply into the RNA platform. However, the emergence of virus variants resistant to first generation of RNA vaccines presents ongoing challenges in the containment. The waning of vaccine-elicited immunity over several months also necessitates repeated vaccinations. Furthermore, frequent systemic adverse events owing to the high reactogenicity may become the roadblock for the repeated vaccinations in the post-pandemic phase.
To address these apparent weaknesses in the RNA and other new vaccine platforms, it is imperative to comprehend our immune system's responses behind the immunogenicity and reactogenicity. Cutting-edge technologies have been introduced to profile the human immune system at both molecular and cellular levels, providing vital insights into immune system dynamics and molecular/cellular targets for new R&D initiatives. This talk explores the potential of immune profiling with the examples from COVID-19 vaccine.
