Hangzhou Talk #10
Viral structure, B cell repertoire and vaccine design
Vaccines mainly induce humoral and cellular immune responses through immunogens and adjuvants to produce neutralizing antibodies and other protective substances. When the body comes into contact with this pathogen again, it quickly starts the immune system to neutralize and kill the pathogen. Traditional vaccines include live-attenuated vaccine, inactivated vaccine, vector vaccine and subunit vaccine etc., and they can effectively protect a variety of infectious diseases. However, the vaccines can do nothing with some infectious diseases, such as AIDS, dengue fever, respiratory syncytial virus pneumonia, ASFV and herpes. Vaccines that adopting new technologies, such as mRNA vaccine and nanoparticle candidate vaccine, have shown the advantages of short R&D cycle, rapidness, efficient induction, long-term protection and personalized upgrade, and thus have a bright future. The core of new vaccine R&D lies in the design concept on the basis of certain basic research, and new vaccines are expected to have immunogens with stable and correct conformation in vivo or in vitro and induce sufficient neutralizing antibodies. The best immunity is that a variety of different types of neutralizing antibodies (diversity of neutralizing antibodies) are produced to target at different epitopes to exert high-efficiency inhibitory effects by using different neutralization mechanisms, as well as resist the risks of vaccine failure caused by mutations of the virus at some points. However, un-designed immunogens can only induce partial neutralizing antibodies. Especially, the proportion of memory antibodies is much lower. The identified epitope, neutralization titer, neutralization mechanism, memory association, maternal generation mechanism and other scientific problems of a variety of neutralizing antibodies are systematically researched.
