Vaccine Development

Monitoring of viral recombination can be used to enhance vaccine development.  Viruses use recombination to escape immunological or drug targeting. 

 The recombination follows well defined rules which can be used to monitor the efficacy of new or modified vaccines.  The rules can also be used to predict new variants, so vaccines can be developed before viruses emerge.  The rules of recombination appear to apply to all viruses so viral vaccine strategies can be broadly applied.