Major Database Launched to Aid Vaccine Development Worldwide

National Institutes of Health- (NIH; Bethesda, MD, USA) sponsored Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB) 2.0 launch was announced by researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology (La Jolla, CA, USA), who designed, developed, and continue to host the database under a multimillion dollar NIH contract.

The IEDB is the world's largest collection of scientific data on how the immune system responds to infectious diseases, and it is freely available online to researchers worldwide. "With this new version, we have curated hundreds of thousands of experimental data points and created a simplified search process that will significantly assist researchers around the globe in their efforts to develop new and better vaccines,” said Alessandro Sette, Ph.D., the IEDB's lead scientist and director of the La Jolla Institute's Center for Infectious Disease.

While the 2.0 launch was not timed to coincide with the swine flu outbreak, it nonetheless points up the importance of such public health tools, reported Bjoern Peters, Ph.D., the database's coprincipal investigator for bioinformatics. "The IEDB provides data on more than 50,000 epitopes, which are the sites on a virus that the immune system targets for attack. This information is key for researchers in developing new treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics,” said Dr. Peters. "Researchers will undoubtedly tap into the database in working to combat swine flu as well as other emerging or reemerging infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, West Nile virus, and dengue fever.”

The IEDB was originally launched in 2006 in the midst of bioterrorism concerns and was financed via the federal biodefense research program. "The idea was to create a central, searchable information resource that would allow researchers worldwide to quickly share and analyze data in an unprecedented manner,” said Stephen Wilson, Ph.D., the IEDB's project director. "In doing so, it would accelerate the development of new and better vaccines. Researchers would not have to reinvent the wheel when conducting experiments. Instead, they could go to the IEDB and view and analyze all immune epitope data previously published, which related to their work.”

The La Jolla Institute received the contract for developing the database in 2004 under a competitive bid process via the National Institutes of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. Creating the database meant gathering information from thousands of separate research articles published over several decades. It also meant designing a first-ever format. "We were creating a repository and method of data sharing that had never existed before,” Dr. Wilson said. In its first iteration, released in 2006, Institute developers took a more bioinformatics approach, presenting the data in a heavily analytic format. With the 2.0 launch, the Institute now had the benefit of user feedback, according to Dr. Wilson, and could make the database easier to search, focusing more specifically on key terms and concepts used by biologists to mine data.

One vital element of this, according to Dr. Sette, was ensuring that the database used shared terms, labeling, and presentation formats common across various scientific databases now in use by researchers around the globe. "The modern researcher needs to be able to access all this information and to be able to jump from the genome database to the chemical structure database to the immune epitope database quickly with the assurance that the data are presented using similar formats for easy understandability,” he said.

To accomplish this goal, Dr. Peters noted that the Institute sought input from bioengineering computer experts and scientific leaders in the field. "This version taps into how the user really thinks and how they universally access data,” he said. "In addition, we've provided more computational tools that enable researchers to quickly analyze their data.”

Along with increased usability, the database's information resources have grown immensely over the last several years. "The 2.0 version catalogues over 95% of the published information currently available on the immune epitope response to infectious diseases, and is continuously updated,” Dr. Peters said.

Moreover, La Jolla Institute researchers are currently adding data on epitope responses to allergies and autoimmune diseases that will benefit researchers in those areas.

Related Links:
Epitope Database and Analysis Resource
National Institutes of Health
La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology