Pharmacogenomics in the Evaluation of Efficacy and Adverse Events During Clinical Development of Vaccines

The understanding of vaccine-induced immune responses in adults and infants is limited. Current vaccination schedules for infants are frequently debated. Especially, the relationship among the timing, the frequency of the dosing, and the generation of an immunological memory are debated. Vaccine antigen-induced cytokine responses to vaccinations given in infancy are of particular interest because little is known about cellular responses in this age, and the information available is based on antibody responses. Pharmacogenomics is ideally suited to study cellular responses related to immune response; in addition, toxicity, inflammation, apoptosis, stress, and oncogenesis can be monitored, since the expression of thousands of genes can be measured in a single experiment.