Evolution of Bacterial Vaccines: from Pasteur to Genomics.

Abstract

Vaccination against bacteria offers its share of challenges, and important progress has been made in recent years. Conventional vaccinology has protected poultry for decades with killed and attenuated bacterial vaccines. Because of the limitations of these vaccines, and given the latest technological advances, other types of vaccines were developed using various strategies. New vaccines are also being commercialized using viral or bacterial recombinant vectors or in the form of subunit vaccines developed by a genomic approach and bioinformatics analyses. As bacteria are forever-evolving microorganisms, there is no doubt that vaccine strategies preventing bacterial diseases will also evolve and that new generations of vaccines are yet to come.