Goals

As you read this paragraph, two infants in the world will have died from an infection for which there is an effective vaccine. Worldwide we could save 5 million infants every year—if only we could immunize them on time. There appear to be many reasons—none of them insurmountable—why the world fails to save the lives of these children. The work in our lab focuses on part of the science to help solve this problem: we are developing a vaccine system that with only one immunization given at birth will protect from a wide range of specific infectious diseases, as well as from allergies, autoimmune diseases and malignancies, for the entire life. This is a big task, and we may naively underestimate the hurdles before us. Nevertheless, we're confident that we will eventually achieve this goal, if only because of the moral and ethical imperative we face: we owe it to the 5 million infants that die from vaccine-preventable infections every year.

We are systematically analyzing the human neonatal and infant response to danger signals (e.g. TLR-ligands) and vaccines. This way, we will learn what aspects of the newborn's immune system work well. With that knowledge, we hope to identify immune modulators or adjuvants that would aid in their immune response to vaccines and help protect them from disease. This work is done in close collaboration with several national and international research centres through large clinical trials. Our lab uses state-of-the-art technology (high-throughput flow cytometry, multiplex ELISA, real-time PCR, SNP genotyping, microarrays, etc.) to get the most information from very small samples. Part of this also requires a solid investment into development of optimal bioinformatics tools, and we are part of an international group focused on this important task.

Parallel to the human descriptive studies, we are developing a vaccine platform in mice on which we can test our vaccines and define the exact molecular mechanisms at work. For example, we use genetically altered strains of Listeria monocytogenes to target our vaccines to only those cells we want to infect, to then deliver its vaccine antigen, induce the desired immune response, and disappear—all without causing any harm to the newborn. Our preliminary data gives us great hope that our final goal is within reach.