With increase of life expectancy worldwide, people are looking for better quality of life, and vaccination is arguably one of the best tools. In addition to developing vaccines for elusive infectious diseases, the challenge of future vaccination strategies will be both to improve efficacy of currently available vaccines for groups of people with frail immunity and to develop new vaccines for noncommunicable diseases such as autoimmunity and cancer. More personalized vaccination should take into account age, gender, health, and nutritional status and geographical/environmental conditions in order to improve protection.

Vaccine efficacy is greatly enhanced by adjuvants. Adjuvants are agents or strategies that cause the amplification of vaccine-specific adaptive immunity and generation of protective memory by inducing a mild innate/inflammatory reaction. Safety is a major issue with adjuvants, since adverse effects are difficult to avoid. For a long time, the only adjuvant approved for human use has been alum, until the recent development and approval of new adjuvants such as monophosphoryl Lipid A and MF59. It is clear that development of safer adjuvants and the design of their appropriate use will greatly influence vaccination strategies. Novel technologies required for better yet safe vaccination and protection are the induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies, novel adjuvants/delivery systems, structural vaccinology, reverse vaccinology, and nanotechnology. With biodegradable nanosized materials, we expect to maximize vaccine efficacy by better targeted delivery and concomitant adjuvanticity.

In this exciting period of reborn interest for vaccines, it is important that we investigate and revisit the mechanism of action of old and new adjuvants and provide insight for their practical use in vaccine formulations. Thanks to the impressive advancements in the knowledge of innate immunity mechanisms, pattern recognition receptors, and intracellular signaling system, novel adjuvants are able to selectively activate one or more of these pathways in a controlled fashion, thereby reducing their adverse effect.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Developing ligands/activators of innate immune receptors as adjuvants
• Inflammation-related effects of adjuvants
• Biomarkers/correlates of protective immunity in relation to adjuvants
• New models to test and understand the mechanism of action of adjuvants
• Adjuvant for targeting specific host immune responses
• Adjuvant in vaccine development against noncommunicable diseases
• Effective and safe mucosal adjuvant
• Nanoparticles as next generation adjuvants