Influenza is a serious public health problem, since seasonal epidemics affect approximately 5-10% of the population and thus give rise to a heavy social and healthcare burden. The heavy burden of disease is due to several factors, one of which is the biological features of the pathogen. Indeed influenza viruses display high mutation rates and undergo frequent genetic reassortment. Minor variati...

BACKGROUND Immunological strategies that achieve the prevention of tumor growth are based on the presumption that the immune system, if triggered before tumor onset, could be able to defend from specific cancers. In supporting this assertion, in the last decade active immunization approaches prevented some virus-related cancers in humans. An immunopreventive cell vaccine for the non-virus-relat...

DNA vaccines can induce both humoral and cellular immune responses. Although some DNA vaccines are already licensed for infectious diseases in animals, they are not licensed for human use because the risk and benefit of DNA vaccines is still controversial. Indeed, in humans, the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines is lower than that of other traditional vaccines. To develop the use of DNA vaccines i...

A number of factors are recognized to influence immune responses to vaccinations including age, gender, the dose, and quality of the antigen used, the number of doses given, the route of administration, and the nutritional status of the recipient. Additionally, several immunogenetic studies have identified associations between polymorphisms in genes encoding immune response proteins, both innat...

DNA vaccines can induce both humoral and cellular immune responses. Although some DNA vaccines are already licensed for infectious diseases in animals, they are not licensed for human use because the risk and benefit of DNA vaccines is still controversial. Indeed, in humans, the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines is lower than that of other traditional vaccines. To develop the use of DNA vaccines i...

In the event of pandemic influenza, only limited supplies of vaccine may be available. We use stochastic epidemic simulations, genetic algorithms (GA), and random mutation hill climbing (RMHC) to find optimal vaccine distributions to minimize the number of illnesses or deaths in the population, given limited quantities of vaccine. Due to the non-linearity, complexity and stochasticity of the ep...

BACKGROUND Hepatitis B vaccination is the most important tool available for preventing hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and reducing the prevalence of infection. However, epidemiological studies have demonstrated that morethan 5% of patients exhibit a non- or hypo-response to the HBV vaccine. Genetic variations associated with T cell immunity contribute to the immune response to HBV vaccinatio...