AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, May 25, 1998
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
Marking its emergence, the first supplement to the journal Nature Medicine is dedicated to vaccinology. The issue, which carries no advertising, is sponsored by the Merck Vaccine Division.
"Why vaccines?" rhetorically asks Nature Medicine editor Adrian J. Ivinson in an opening editorial. His answer is twofold: that there has been "a spate of vaccine research activity" based on "a better mechanistic underpinning to vaccine design;" and that there is growing government and public awareness of vaccine importance.
In fact, vaccinology represents the point of convergence of a wide range of scientific developments, including but not limited to breakthroughs in molecular biology and immunology. And this scientific convergence represents only a part of the field: equally important are economic and political issues that must be addressed for real-world vaccine manufacture and distribution.
"World vaccinology remains a bubbling melting pot of science and politics," noted Gustav Nossal, chair of the Children's Vaccine Initiative (CVI) scientific advisory committee, in an editorial appearing in the supplement ("Living Up to The Legacy," Nat Med, 4(5S):475-6).
And there are other signs that vaccinology is coming into its own. World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn in March 1998 called a vaccine summit meeting in Washington, D.C., to which he summoned executives from the world's leading public health agencies and vaccine manufacturers. If the world is to adopt a tiered pricing system permitting large-scale manufacture and distribution of vaccines - with richer nations paying the lion's share - the World Bank may be the one agency with enough clout to achieve the task. A second meeting is planned before the end of the year.
On a smaller, more technical scale, the First Annual Conference on Vaccine Research is scheduled for May 30-June 1, 1998, in Washington, D.C. Growing out of smaller conferences organized by the International Society for Vaccines (ISV), the new annual conference is jointly sponsored by ISV, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the U.S. National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID).
A clue to the revived interest in vaccines - and to the breadth of the field - can be seen in the review articles that appear in the Nature Medicine supplement: an overview of vaccine development by DNA vaccine pioneer Margaret A. Liu, and overviews of research into vaccines for HIV, cancer, and malaria.
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