Controlling Influenza by Cytotoxic T-Cells: Calling for Help from Destroyers

Figure 1

Immunomics comprises the study of immunological processes, thereby integrating new technologies and immunoinformatics tools from which the development of CTL vaccines can benefit. Immunoinformatics allows to collect, analyze, and manage data from research or the clinic into databases. This allows in return to formulate new research hypotheses or the prediction of new vaccine candidates. Promising epitopes are validated as vaccines in experimental set-ups or clinical trials. Hereby vaccines can be used as tools to address fundamental research questions, and immunological analysis can provide means to estimate vaccine efficacy or to determine correlates of protection. The many feed back loops in the system allow optimization of the development process and might ultimately result in a CTL-based vaccine that can induce heterosubtypic immunity against influenza.