07/2019. El Escorial Summer Course: Trained Immunity-based Vaccines
Trained Immunity-based Vaccines (TIbV) represent a conceptually important advance as they open new avenues to vaccine design against recurrent infections that are difficult to prevent. In the summer course “Trained immunity-based vaccines: the innate immune memory working towards antiinfectious immunotherapy” this topic has been addressed from the most basic aspects to the potential clinical relevance.
The course, conducted under the direction of Dr. Silvia Sánchez-Ramón (Head of the Immunology Service of the San Carlos Hospital, Madrid) and Dr. Laura Conejero Hall (Medical Dept. of INMUNOTEK) as Scientific Secretariat, and coordinated by Prof. Eduardo Martínez-Naves (Complutense University of Madrid), has brought to different experts in basic and clinical research in the field, and an outstanding audience.
Trained immunity is the ability of innate immune cells to act with a certain immune memory, something that, until very recently, was only thought that adaptive immunity could do. “The description that the cells of the innate immune system are able to remember past stimuli to generate more potent responses is a revolutionary paradigm shift”, said Dr. Jorge Dominguez, a researcher at the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Science (RIMLS) of Holland.
“The potential is enormous. The application of trained immunity will improve the responses of existing vaccines, help the creation of new ones, more effective in time, as well as allow the formulation of new therapies against various diseases such as cancer” , Dr. Dominguez said.