Vaccine-mediated immunity against dengue and the potential for long-term protection against disease

REVIEW ARTICLE

Front. Immunol., 06 May 2014 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2014.00195

Mark K. Slifka*

• Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Division of Neuroscience, Oregon National Primate Research Center, Oregon Health & Science University, Beaverton, OR, USA

It is estimated that over 2.5 billion people are at risk for contracting dengue, a virus responsible for 50–390 million infections in addition to thousands of hospitalizations and deaths each year. There are no licensed vaccines available to combat this pathogen but substantial efforts are underway to develop live-attenuated, inactivated, and subunit vaccines that will protect against each of the four serotypes of dengue. Unfortunately, the results of a recent Phase IIb efficacy trial involving a tetravalent live-attenuated chimeric dengue virus vaccine have raised questions with regard to our current understanding of vaccine-mediated immunity to this important flavivirus. Here, we will briefly summarize these vaccination efforts and discuss the importance of informative in vivo models for determining vaccine efficacy and the need to establish a quantitative correlate of immunity in order to predict the duration of vaccine-induced antiviral protection.

Read Full Text

Keywords: dengue, antibody, CD8+ T cells, CD4+ T cells, immunological memory, correlates of immunity, vaccines

Citation: Slifka MK (2014) Vaccine-mediated immunity against dengue and the potential for long-term protection against disease. Front. Immunol. 5:195. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2014.00195

Received: 27 February 2014; Paper pending published: 27 March 2014;
Accepted: 21 April 2014; Published online: 06 May 2014.

Edited by:

Simona Zompi, University of California Berkeley, USA

Reviewed by:

Claude-Agnes Reynaud, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, France
Shahram Salek-Ardakani, University of Florida, USA

Copyright: © 2014 Slifka. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Mark K. Slifka, Division of Neuroscience, Oregon National Primate Research Center, Oregon Health & Sciences University, 505 NW 185th Avenue, Beaverton, OR 97006, USA e-mail: slifkam@ohsu.edu