Hepatitis B vaccines: blueprints for vaccines of the future

A Global View to HBV Chronic Infection: Evolving Strategies for Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention in Immunocompetent Individuals

Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) is a significant public health challenge. Around 250 million people live with chronic HBV infection. With a global approach to this issue, we focus on new perspective in diagnosis, management and prevention of HBV chronic infection. Precise diagnosis of HBV status is crucial to guide patient management. Although available drugs reduce the risk of liver disease progression, they are not able to definitely eradicate HBV, and new therapeutic options are urgently needed. Thus, prevention of HBV infection is still the most effective strategy to achieve the control of the disease. Key aspects of prevention programs include surveillance of viral hepatitis, screening programs and immunization strategies. In spite of the high success rate of licensed HBV vaccines, a need for improved vaccine persists, especially in order to provide coverage of current non-responders.

New developments in adjuvants

The development of improved methods for the production of vaccines have fostered the use of purified subunits in place of live attenuated and whole inactivated organisms. Greater understanding of immune mechanisms has stimulated efforts to design vaccines that elicit specific mechanisms of resistance to particular pathogens. Together these forces have driven a search for novel adjuvants with specific properties optimally suited to vaccines for particular diseases. At the First International Conference on Immunology and Aging, a mini-symposium was devoted to the topic of new adjuvants. This review and the following two papers summarize the proceedings of the mini-symposium and illustrate the potential for the development of new adjuvants of greater efficacy and specificity, and the complexities involved in bringing new discoveries in adjuvants from the laboratory to the clinic.