Human cell-based in vitro systems for vaccine evaluation

Vaccines are one of the most efficient ways to prevent infectious diseases. However, the development of vaccines is both time-consuming and expensive, and often follows a trial and error approach. Consequently, many vaccines that have succeeded in animal experiments have failed in humans. There is thus an urgent need for alternative ways to screen vaccine candidates before they go in clinical trials. In this thesis, we used human blood cells to establish in vitro systems which allow us to evaluate responses to vaccines. By bringing together human blood cells with different vaccines we could demonstrate that our in vitro systems are able to discriminate between vaccine types and respond to them in distinct ways. The observed in vitro responses closely mimicked the responses as detected in humans after vaccination confirming the validity of our approach. The in vitro systems are not only highly suitable to select promising vaccine candidates and to reveal their working mechanisms, but also allow us to develop better vaccines for the future. Overall, our human blood cell-based in vitro systems are a powerful tool for vaccine development and screening which can help in reducing the use of animals, shortening the development time and reducing the costs of vaccines