有兴趣深入研究疫苗开发的可以参考以下英文文章， 挺有趣的。
迷糊
Advances in Vaccine Development
Interesting article on emerging advances in vaccine development.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ck-to-vaccines In Brief
•Traditional methods of vaccine design depend a lot on trial and error. Researchers develop a compound they think should provoke an immune response and then test it on thousands of people.
•An emerging field of research called systems biology could make the development and testing of vaccines faster and more efficient.
•Research teams measure changes in genetic activity, protein levels and cellular behavior of the immune system in response to a potential vaccine. Powerful computers analyze the resulting data to develop molecular profiles of those responses.
•By comparing these profiles with the ideal profile that should be generated by a wholly protective immune response, investigators can quickly home in on and improve the most promising vaccine formulas.
(first portion of article - you to pay or pick up hard copy magazine for entire)
Aids researchers and advocates were devastated in 2007, when a much anticipated vaccine against HIV unexpectedly failed to protect anyone in a clinical trial of 3,000 people. Even worse, the experimental inoculation, developed with money from the Merck pharmaceutical company and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, actually increased the chances that some people would later acquire HIV. Millions of dollars and more than a decade of research had gone into creating the vaccine. Meanwhile, in that same 10-year period, 18 million people died of AIDS, and millions more were infected.
The Merck vaccine failed in large part because investigators do not yet know how to create the perfect vaccine. Yes, a number of vaccines have been spectacularly successful. Think of polio and smallpox. In truth, though, luck played a big role in those successes. Based on limited knowledge of the immune system and of the biology of a pathogen, investigators made educated guesses at vaccine formulations that might work and then, perhaps after some tinkering, had the good fortune to be proved right when the vaccine protected people. But all too often lack of insight into the needed immune response leads to disappointment, with a vaccine candidate recognized as ineffective only after a large human trial has been performed.
