Systems biology and single cell approaches to study human immune responses to vaccination

The move toward precision medicine has highlighted the importance of understanding biological variability within and across individuals in the human population. In particular, given the prevalent involvement of the immune system in diverse pathologies, an important question is how much and what information about the state of the immune system is required to enable accurate prediction of future health and response to medical interventions. Towards addressing this question, our and others’ recent studies using vaccination as a model perturbation and systems-biology approaches are beginning to provide a glimpse of how natural population variation together with multiplexed, high-throughput measurement and computational analysis can be used to uncover predictors of vaccination response quality in humans. Here I discuss our recent work in this emerging field, with emphasis on baseline correlates of vaccination responses, as well as highlighting relevant features of study design, data generation, and computational analysis