Historical Advances in Structural and Molecular Biology and How They Impacted Vaccine Development

Wayne C Koff; Rino Rappuoli; Stanley A Plotkin

doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2023.168113

Historical Advances in Structural and Molecular Biology and How They Impacted Vaccine Development

J Mol Biol. 2023 Jul 1;435(13):168113. doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2023.168113. Epub 2023 Apr 18.

Authors

Wayne C Koff¹, Rino Rappuoli², Stanley A Plotkin³

Affiliations

¹ Human Immunome Project, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: https://twitter.com/ImmunomePro.
² Fondazione Biotechnopolo, Siena, Italy.
³ University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

PMID: 37080423
DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2023.168113

Abstract

Vaccines are among the greatest tools for prevention and control of disease. They have eliminated smallpox from the planet, decreased morbidity and mortality for major infectious diseases like polio, measles, mumps, and rubella, significantly blunted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and prevented viral induced cancers such as cervical cancer caused by human papillomavirus. Recent technological advances, in genomics, structural biology, and human immunology have transformed vaccine development, enabling new technologies such as mRNA vaccines to greatly accelerate development of new and improved vaccines. In this review, we briefly highlight the history of vaccine development, and provide examples of where advances in genomics and structural biology, paved the way for development of vaccines for bacterial and viral diseases.

Keywords: Vaccine development; genomics; structural vaccinology.

Publication types

Review
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

COVID-19 / prevention & control
Humans
Molecular Biology* / history
Molecular Biology* / trends
Pandemics
Viral Vaccines* / history
Virus Diseases* / history
Virus Diseases* / prevention & control

Substances

Viral Vaccines