Significant progress has been made in the last 20 years following international effort engaging various government agencies and industry across the world to research and develop vaccines and therapies for biodefense. This has involved new thinking about the process of licensing and relabelling of medical countermeasures without setting up classical human phase III clinical trials. The introduction of the FDA Animal Rule (2002) has propelled the development of preclinical animal models representing the human disease syndrome and the derivation of surrogate markers and correlates of protection.

This special issue focuses on the progress, challenges, and recent advances in the area of biodefense vaccines and therapies by referencing individual pathogens on the CDC select agent list. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Vaccine strategies
• Future vaccine developments including “omic” technologies
• Clinical development and prospects for license through the animal rule/correlates of protection
• Preclinical animal models
• Postexposure therapy (including vaccines, antibiotics, immunotherapy, and small molecules)

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jir/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/jir/biod/ according to the following timetable: