Pharmacological Immunogenicity and Adverse Responses to Vaccines

Mary Kate Hart, Mark Bolanowski, and Robert V. House 

The historic objective of vaccination has been to induce long-lasting immunity against a disease for which the recipient is at risk. The most successful vaccination campaign eradicated smallpox as a public health problem. Particularly, vaccination against common infectious agents, including poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, and rubella, over the last 50 years has led to effective prevention of many diseases. 

Short-term immunity may be achieved by passive vaccination, or the transfer of protective antibodies into the recipient. Vaccination is currently being explored as a therapeutic approach for inducing needed immune responses in individuals who have acquired a disease (e.g., cancer or Alzheimer s disease) 

Immunotoxicology Strategies for Pharmaceutical Safety Assessment, edited by Danuta J. Herzyk 

For over three decades, there has been an increasing understanding that exposure to human therapeutics, including immunotherapeutics, can produce adverse changes in the human immune response (House and Luebke, 2006). While this has historically been associated primarily with immunosuppression, more recently the potential deleterious effects of immunostimulation (whether inadvertent or deliberate) have received increased attention (Shankar et al., 2006). Although the methods and tools for assessing pathology associated with 

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Chapter 7.1 Pharmacological Immunogenicity and Adverse Responses to Vaccines... 

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