Bioinformatics for Vaccinology

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Vaccines: Computational solutions

Among these things, one thing seems certain - that nothing certain exists and that there is nothing more pitiful or more presumptuous than man.

—Pliny the Elder

Vaccines and the world

The global population continues to rise. Average global prosperity is also rising yet millions still hover at the edge of extinction. As a result the world faces problems as never before: disease and the economic and societal complexity of health provision; famine and hunger at one extreme, obesity and wanton overindulgence at the other; pollution, global warming and the struggle for scarce natural resources and potable water. 97% of our water is locked into the world's oceans. 2% is frozen in glaciers. The remaining 1% is, figuratively at least, in our hands. The world depends on mineral oil: it runs our cars and planes and trains; it is the feed stock of the chemical industry and thus of plastics and pharmaceuticals. The economy depends on it and we fight wars over it. Yet now we face the imminence of ‘peak oil’, after which current supplies will dwindle in the face of growing demand, fuelled in part by the burgeoning economies of India and China. They place pressure on global oil delivery systems already labouring under the West's insatiable appetite for oil; thus extant stocks will fail. New reserves exist but it is highly likely that they will prove vastly less tractable than those we are currently exploiting.

Each of these is a robust challenge which the world ...