Systems Biology: A New Era for Vaccine Development; from Deductive Toward Inductive

Routine vaccination has always been a center of controversy due to its lack of acceptability among the masses. Adverse event (AE) study relating to vaccine making is termed ‘adversomics,’ focusing on studying the adverse events associated with vaccination. As the technology improves, with the advancement of recombinant DNA technology, we get to see biology from the molecular perspective and manipulate it according to our wishes for betterment. The complete knowledge of the human genomic sequence now presents new unexploited fields. The advent of high-dimension assay technology and system biology presents a plethora of potential in developing vaccines with a newer approach that incorporates the recent discoveries about iRNA, transcriptome, immunogenetics, and many more. The major problem associated with complex diseases is low immunogenicity and difficulty to isolate antigens. For example, in the case of meningococcus B, an endless four decades of efforts using conventional methods of microbiology and biochemistry could not provide us with an effective and universal vaccine. It was later decided to obtain genomic sequencing of the serogroup B Neisseria meningitidis (MenB) and use this information for vaccine manufacturing. This was a novel approach denoted as “reverse vaccinology.”