Related papers: Improved inference for vaccine-induced immune resp…
Safe and effective preventive vaccines have the potential to help stem the HIV epidemic. The efficacy of such vaccines is typically measured in randomized, double-blind phase IIb/III trials and described as a reduction in newly acquired HIV…
The advent and subsequent widespread availability of preventive vaccines has altered the course of public health over the past century. Despite this success, effective vaccines to prevent many high-burden diseases, including HIV, have been…
H1N1 influenza causes substantial seasonal illness and was the subtype of the 2009 influenza pandemic. Precise measures of antigenic distance between the vaccine and circulating virus strains help researchers design influenza vaccines with…
A key objective in vaccine studies is to evaluate vaccine-induced immunogenicity and determine whether participants have mounted a response to the vaccine. Cellular immune responses are essential for assessing vaccine-induced…
While conducting probabilistic surveys is the gold standard for assessing vaccine coverage, implementing these surveys poses challenges for global health. There is a need for more convenient option that is more affordable and practical.…
Developing accurate and reliable methods to estimate vaccine protection is a key goal in immunology and public health. While several statistical methods have been proposed, their potential inaccuracy in capturing fast intra-seasonal waning…
In vaccine development, the temporal profiles of relative abundance of subtypes of immune cells (T-cells) is key to understanding vaccine efficacy. Complex and expensive experimental studies generate very sparse time series data on this…
While the HVTN 505 trial showed no overall efficacy of the tested vaccine to prevent HIV infection over placebo, previous studies, biological theories, and the finding that immune response markers strongly correlated with infection in…
Understanding waning of vaccine-induced protection is important for both immunology and public health. Population heterogeneities in underlying (pre-vaccination) susceptibility and vaccine response can cause measured vaccine effectiveness…
In vaccine studies for infectious diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the frequency and type of contacts between study participants and infectious sources are among the most informative risk factors, but are often not…
Clinical trials of a vaccine during an epidemic face particular challenges, such as the pressure to identify an effective vaccine quickly to control the epidemic, and the effect that time-space-varying infection incidence has on the power…
A persistent public health challenge is finding immunization schemes that are effective in combating highly mutable pathogens such as HIV and influenza viruses. To address this, we analyze a simplified model of affinity maturation, the…
Mutational escape from vaccine induced immune responses has thwarted the development of a successful vaccine against AIDS, whose causative agent is HIV, a highly mutable virus. Knowing the virus' fitness as a function of its proteomic…
Studies of vaccine efficacy often record both the incidence of vaccine-targeted virus strains (primary outcome) and the incidence of non-targeted strains (secondary outcome). However, standard estimates of vaccine efficacy on targeted…
Pathogens usually exist in heterogeneous variants, like subtypes and strains. Quantifying treatment effects on the different variants is important for guiding prevention policies and treatment development. Here we ground analyses of…
To address the vaccine hesitancy which impairs the efforts of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, it is imperative to understand public vaccination attitudes and timely grasp their changes. In spite of reliability and trustworthiness,…
Immune checkpoint inhibitor--based therapies often produce heterogeneous survival responses, including early risk, delayed treatment benefit, and durable long-term survival in a subset of patients. In these settings, conventional summary…
Studies of HPV vaccine efficacy usually record infections with vaccine targeted and nontargeted strains. Contrary to blinded randomized controlled trials, confounding bias can be a threat and risk compensation may occur in observational…
Assessing immune responses to study vaccines as surrogates of protection plays a central role in vaccine clinical trials. Motivated by three ongoing or pending HIV vaccine efficacy trials, we consider such surrogate endpoint assessment in a…
Vaccination has played an important role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases. However, the limited availability of vaccines and personnel at the roll-out of a new vaccine and the costs of vaccination campaigns often limit how…