Baseline Predictors Bioinformatics Analysis of the Human Immune Response to Yellow Fever YF-17D Vaccine
The factors influencing variations in the human immune response to vaccines and infection diseases are still not well understood. Pre-vaccination environmental factors such as demographics, physiological and nutritional factors could play an important role in this regard. To address the influence of the baseline parameters on vaccine response, we performed a computational systems biology analysis that uses and combines gene expression, cell subset frequency and cytokines measurements to predict vaccine response in two different cohorts, from Africa (Entebbe) and Europe (Lausanne), vaccinated with the YF-17D vaccine. The project provides an important resource for studying human immune response to vaccination and infectious diseases. We found that innate and adaptive activation are a key pathway that impacts, at baseline, the immune response to YF-17D vaccine and suggests the possible implication of microbial translocation as an up-stream mechanism to the immune defects detected at baseline. Two publications have recently been published in collaboration with groups at U Minnesota (D Masopust) in the journal Nature and with the group at Washington University in St. Louis (Skip Virgin) in the journal Cell, Host and Microbe.
The next step for this project is to investigate the association between the microbiota and the immune response to vaccine and also the integration, using systems biology approaches, of the microbiome data with the molecular and the cellular data to build powerful predictive models.