Vaccines have a significant impact on public health, and vaccinology in the era of genomics is taking advantage of new technologies to
tackle diseases for which vaccine development has so far been unsuccessful. Almost all existing vaccines were developed based on traditional
vaccinology methods, which relied on empirical screening of a few candidates at a time, based on known features of the pathogen.
However, the ability to sequence a pathogenβs genome provides access to its entire antigenic repertoire. As such, genomics has catalysed
a shift in vaccine development towards sequence-based βReverse Vaccinologyβ approaches, which use high-throughput in silico
screening of the entire genome of a pathogen to identify genes that encode proteins with the attributes of good vaccine targets. Furthermore,
the increasing availability of genome sequences has led to the development and application of additional technologies to vaccine
discovery, including comparative genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, immunomics and structural genomics. Vaccine candidates
identified from a pathogenβs genome or proteome can then be expressed as recombinant proteins and tested in appropriate in vitro or
in vivo models to assess immunogenicity and protection. The process of reverse vaccinology has been applied to several pathogens,
including serogroup B Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus agalactiae, Streptococcus pyogenes, Streptococcus pneumoniae and pathogenic Escherichia
coli, and has provided scores of new candidate antigens for preclinical and clinical investigation. As novel genome-based technologies
continue to emerge, it is expected that new vaccines for unmet diseases will be within reach.