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Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation

Guest Editors:
Rajib Deb: ICAR-National Research Center on Pig, India
Sandeep Kumar Dhanda: St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA
Wen-Qiang He: University of Sydney, Australia


BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology
and BMC Infectious Diseases welcomed submissions to our Collection on Vaccines for infectious diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation. The development of the COVID vaccine in the last year, the recent WHO endorsement of a malaria vaccine for children and the ongoing monkeypox outbreak brought into sharp focus the importance of vaccines in managing and mitigating the risks associated with infectious diseases. The emergence of new vaccine technologies, such as the RNA vaccines, are providing new avenues for vaccine development. However, suitable vaccines for many infectious diseases do not yet exist and this paucity is exemplified by neglected tropical diseases such as dengue, chagas and helminth infections where vaccine development is slow and challenging. In recognition of the multidisciplinary approach required to develop vaccines, BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology
and BMC Infectious Diseases welcomed submissions to this collection.

Meet the Guest Editors

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Rajib Deb: ICAR-National Research Center on Pig, India

In addition to having a degree in veterinary science and animal husbandry, Dr Rajib Deb also completed a postgraduate programme and a PhD in animal biotechnology. He is currently employed by the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) as a Senior Scientist at the National Research Center on Pig in India. He is currently working on research initiatives to develop new generation diagnostic tools and swine disease vaccines. Having worked in the field of molecular biology for more than 12 years, he has published more than 50 research papers in scholarly international journals. He is now developing virus-like particle-based vaccines to safeguard against swine diseases. He is on the BMC Biotechnology editorial board as well.

Sandeep Kumar Dhanda:  St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA

He obtained his doctorate from a joint PhD program of CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and is currently working as a research scientist at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, TN, USA. Dr Dhanda’s research led to the development of various prediction and analysis tools hosted at the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB-AR), and Computational Resource of Drug Discovery (CRDD) websites. His current research focuses on improving cancer treatment for brain tumor patients through the integration of molecular profiling and designing informed clinical trials. He has an outstanding track record of more than 60 scientific publications and also serving as an academic editor for several reputed journals. He is a well-recognized peer-reviewer, and mentoring the young generation for the same with the Publons Academy. 

Wen-Qiang He:  University of Sydney, Australia 

Dr Wen-Qiang He is a Research Fellow at University of Sydney and Conjunct Lecturer at University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests are on infectious disease epidemiology and cancer epidemiology by using linked administrative health records to conduct large scale cohort studies. His main research projects are on investigating the associations of prenatal infection with pregnancy and birth outcome, the impact of vaccine-preventable infection on longer health outcome (neurodevelopment, cancer), and evaluating vaccine-effectiveness against infections and cancer. He also works on causal inference by using new study design (sibling cohort), novel statistical methods (propensity score matching), and mathematical modelling.

About the collection

BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology, BMC Infectious Diseases is calling for submissions to our Collection on Vaccines for infectious diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation.

The development of the COVID vaccine in the last year, the recent WHO endorsement of a malaria vaccine for children and the ongoing monkeypox outbreak has brought into sharp focus the importance of vaccines in managing and mitigating the risks associated with infectious diseases. The emergence of new vaccine technologies, such as the RNA vaccines, are providing new avenues for vaccine development. However, suitable vaccines for many infectious diseases do not yet exist and this paucity is exemplified by neglected tropical diseases such as dengue, chagas and helminth infections where vaccine development is slow and challenging. Furthermore, our understanding of the immunological mechanisms following vaccination is still limited, but this knowledge will play an important role in developing new and better vaccines. 

In recognition of the multidisciplinary approach required to develop vaccines, BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology, BMC Infectious Diseases welcomes submissions to a newly launched collection “Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation”. We welcome submissions covering all aspects of vaccine development and particularly welcome studies focused on developing vaccines for infectious Neglected Tropical Diseases. Scopes includes but is not limited to:

BMC Immunology

  • Role of the innate immune system activation after immunization
  • Systems biology approaches to identify molecular signatures predictive of vaccine immunogenicity  and protective efficacy
  • Understanding long term immunity 
  • Pre-clinical vaccine models
  • Identifying immunogenic regions
  • antigen targeting


BMC Biotechnology

  • Adjuvants
  • Antibody engineering
  • Classic and new vaccine approaches (e.g. cell vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, inactivated vaccines, RNA/DNA vaccines,  peptide vaccines and conjugate vaccines)
  • Development and scaling up of vaccines
  • Low-cost vaccine technology
  • Vaccine bioreactors
  • Applied immunology in vaccine development
  • mAbs and antibody technology in vaccine development


BMC Infectious Diseases

  • Vaccines for the general population
  • Clinical implications of infectious diseases vaccines
  • Therapeutic vaccines and prophylactic vaccines
  • Safety of vaccines for specific population groups (eg. maternal, neonatal, elderly immunization)
  • Clinical Study Protocols (new vaccines, vaccines in less studied populations or low/middle income countries)
  •  Vaccination programmes
  • Increasing vaccine uptake: Social, economic and geographical inequalities in access to vaccination 
  • Cost-effectiveness studies
  • Mathematical modelling studies 


Image Credit: Daniel Chetroni / Getty

  1. It is important to identify the relationship between the COVID-19 vaccination status and the prognosis of this disease in hospitalized patients to gain a more accurate picture of their status and the effect of...

    Authors: Mohsen Gholinataj Jelodar, Samaneh Mirzaei, Fatemeh Saghafi, Shahab Rafieian, Soheil Rezaei, Alireza Saatchi, Ziba Dehghani Avare and Mahdie Dehghan Niri
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2024 24:254
    Content type: Research Published on:

  2. Control of Tuberculosis (TB) infection is mainly the result of productive teamwork between T-cell populations and antigen presenting cells (APCs). However, APCs activation at the site of initiating cellular im...

    Authors: Zhengzhong Xu, Xin Li, Aihong Xia, Zhifang Zhang, Jiaxu Wan, Yan Gao, Chuang Meng, Xiang Chen and Xin-an Jiao
    Citation: BMC Immunology 2023 24:48
    Content type: Research Published on:

  3. Multi-epitope polypeptide vaccines, a fusion protein, often have a string-of-beads system composed of various specific peptide epitopes, potential adjuvants, and linkers. When choosing the sequence of various ...

    Authors: Niloofar Sadat Tabibpour, Abbas Doosti and Ali Sharifzadeh
    Citation: BMC Immunology 2023 24:46
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. Healthcare workers (HCWs) are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 due to their close contact with infected patients. However, the true burden of COVID-19 among HCWs in Yemen is unknown due to the inadequa...

    Authors: Watheq Thabet Taher, Amen A. Bawazir, Talal A. Sallam and Khaled Alsurimi
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:761
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. Outreach efforts were developed to bolster people’s access to and use of immunization services in underserved populations. However, there have been multiple outbreaks of diseases like measles in Uganda, prompt...

    Authors: Atwiine Flavia, Bagenda Fred and Turyakira Eleanor
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:758
    Content type: Research Published on:

  6. We aimed to compare the adaptive immune response in individuals with or without prior SARS-CoV-2 infections following the administration of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.

    Authors: Sun-Woo Yoon, Kristin Widyasari, Jieun Jang, Seungjun Lee, Taejoon Kang and Sunjoo Kim
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:732
    Content type: Research Published on:

  7. Helicobacter pylori cause a variety of gastric malignancies, gastric ulcers, and cause erosive diseases. The extreme nature of the bacterium and the implantation of this bacterium protects it against designing a ...

    Authors: Zahra Ahmadzadeh Chaleshtori, Ali Asghar Rastegari, Hashem Nayeri and Abbas Doosti
    Citation: BMC Biotechnology 2023 23:42
    Content type: Research Published on:

  8. Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mRNA vaccine effectiveness (VE) has recently declined, and reports about COVID-19 breakthrough infection have increased. We aimed to conduct a meta-analysis on population-b...

    Authors: Xiaohui Jing, Menglin Han, Xiaoxuan Wang and Li Zhou
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:577
    Content type: Research Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:648

  9. Numerous vaccination research experiments have been conducted on non-primate hosts to prevent or control HTLV-1 infection. Therefore, reviewing recent advancements for status assessment and strategic planning ...

    Authors: Niloofar Seighali, Arman Shafiee, Mohammad Ali Rafiee, Dlnya Aminzade and Sayed-Hamidreza Mozhgani
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:320
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  10. The influenza viruses pose a threat to human health and medical services, and vaccination is an important way to prevent infection. However, the effectiveness of influenza vaccines is affected by various aspec...

    Authors: Qiuyi Xu, Hejiang Wei, Simin Wen, Jiamin Chen, Yuxuan Lei, Yanhui Cheng, Weijuan Huang, Dayan Wang and Yuelong Shu
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:211
    Content type: Research Published on: