Yusuf Tutar
The recent modest success in Thailand of the RV144 HIV vaccine trial has shown that it is possible to produce an HIV vaccine. However, developing a vaccine that achieves improved safety would require a more complete understanding of the mechanisms of action and protective correlations of the vaccine. Designing a vaccine that achieves better protection, however, will require a more complete understanding of vaccine mechanisms of action and correlates of protection. Systems biology approaches enable integration of large datasets from a variety of assays and offer new approaches to understanding how vaccine-induced immune responses are coordinately regulated. In this review, we discuss recent advances in clinical trial design, specimen collection, and assay standardization that will generate datasets for systems analyses of immune responses to HIV vaccines.