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Call for Papers - Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation

Guest Editors:
Rajib Deb: ICAR-National Research Center on Pig, India
Sandeep Kumar Dhanda: St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA
Wen-Qiang He: University of Sydney, Australia

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 30 June 2023


BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology
and BMC Infectious Diseases are calling for submissions to our Collection on “Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation”. The development of the COVID vaccine in the last year, the recent WHO endorsement of a malaria vaccine for children and the ongoing monkeypox outbreak has brought into sharp focus the importance of vaccines in managing and mitigating the risks associated with infectious diseases. The emergence of new vaccine technologies, such as the RNA vaccines, are providing new avenues for vaccine development. However, suitable vaccines for many infectious diseases do not yet exist and this paucity is exemplified by neglected tropical diseases such as dengue, chagas and helminth infections where vaccine development is slow and challenging. In recognition of the multidisciplinary approach required to develop vaccines, BMC Immunology, BMC Infectious Diseases and BMC Biotechnology welcomes submissions to a newly launched collection.

Submit to collection

BMC Immunology

BMC Infectious Diseases

BMC Biotechnology

Meet the Guest Editors

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Rajib Deb: ICAR-National Research Center on Pig, India

In addition to having a degree in veterinary science and animal husbandry, Dr. Rajib Deb also completed a postgraduate programme and a PhD in animal biotechnology. He is currently employed by the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) as a Senior Scientist at the National Research Center on Pig in India. He is currently working on research initiatives to develop new generation diagnostic tools and swine disease vaccines. Having worked in the field of molecular biology for more than 12 years, he has published more than 50 research papers in scholarly international journals. He is now developing virus-like particle-based vaccines to safeguard against swine diseases. He is on the BMC Biotechnology editorial board as well.

Sandeep Kumar Dhanda:  St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA
 He obtained his doctorate from a joint PhD program of CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and is currently working as a research scientist at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, TN, USA. Dr. Dhanda’s research led to the development of various prediction and analysis tools hosted at the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB-AR), and Computational Resource of Drug Discovery (CRDD) websites. His current research focuses on improving cancer treatment for brain tumor patients through the integration of molecular profiling and designing informed clinical trials. He has an outstanding track record of more than 60 scientific publications and also serving as an academic editor for several reputed journals. He is a well-recognized peer-reviewer, and mentoring the young generation for the same with the Publons Academy. 

Wen-Qiang He:  University of Sydney, Australia 
Dr. Wen-Qiang He is a Research Fellow at University of Sydney and Conjunct Lecturer at University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests are on infectious disease epidemiology and cancer epidemiology by using linked administrative health records to conduct large scale cohort studies. His main research projects are on investigating the associations of prenatal infection with pregnancy and birth outcome, the impact of vaccine-preventable infection on longer health outcome (neurodevelopment, cancer), and evaluating vaccine-effectiveness against infections and cancer. He also works on causal inference by using new study design (sibling cohort), novel statistical methods (propensity score matching), and mathematical modelling.


About the collection

BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology, BMC Infectious Diseases is calling for submissions to our Collection on Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation.

The development of the COVID vaccine in the last year, the recent WHO endorsement of a malaria vaccine for children and the ongoing monkeypox outbreak has brought into sharp focus the importance of vaccines in managing and mitigating the risks associated with infectious diseases. The emergence of new vaccine technologies, such as the RNA vaccines, are providing new avenues for vaccine development. However, suitable vaccines for many infectious diseases do not yet exist and this paucity is exemplified by neglected tropical diseases such as dengue, chagas and helminth infections where vaccine development is slow and challenging. Furthermore, our understanding of the immunological mechanisms following vaccination is still limited, but this knowledge will play an important role in developing new and better vaccines. 

In recognition of the multidisciplinary approach required to develop vaccines, BMC Immunology, BMC Infectious Diseases and BMC Biotechnology welcomes submissions to a newly launched collection “Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation”. We welcome submissions covering all aspects of vaccine development and particularly welcome studies focused on developing vaccines for infectious Neglected Tropical Diseases. Scopes includes but is not limited to:

BMC Immunology

  • Role of the innate immune system activation after immunization
  • Systems biology approaches to identify molecular signatures predictive of vaccine immunogenicity  and protective efficacy
  • Understanding long term immunity 
  • Pre-clinical vaccine models
  • Identifying immunogenic regions
  • antigen targeting


BMC Biotechnology

  • Adjuvants
  • Antibody engineering
  • Classic and new vaccine approaches (e.g. cell vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, inactivated vaccines, RNA/DNA vaccines,  peptide vaccines and conjugate vaccines)
  • Development and scaling up of vaccines
  • Low-cost vaccine technology
  • Vaccine bioreactors
  • Applied immunology in vaccine development
  • mAbs and antibody technology in vaccine development


BMC Infectious Diseases

  • Vaccines for the general population
  • Clinical implications of infectious diseases vaccines
  • Therapeutic vaccines and prophylactic vaccines
  • Safety of vaccines for specific population groups (eg. maternal, neonatal, elderly immunization)
  • Clinical Study Protocols (new vaccines, vaccines in less studied populations or low/middle income countries)
  •  Vaccination programmes
  • Increasing vaccine uptake: Social, economic and geographical inequalities in access to vaccination 
  • Cost-effectiveness studies
  • Mathematical modelling studies 


Image Credit: Daniel Chetroni / Getty

  1. Numerous vaccination research experiments have been conducted on non-primate hosts to prevent or control HTLV-1 infection. Therefore, reviewing recent advancements for status assessment and strategic planning ...

    Authors: Niloofar Seighali, Arman Shafiee, Mohammad Ali Rafiee, Dlnya Aminzade and Sayed-Hamidreza Mozhgani
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:320
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. The influenza viruses pose a threat to human health and medical services, and vaccination is an important way to prevent infection. However, the effectiveness of influenza vaccines is affected by various aspec...

    Authors: Qiuyi Xu, Hejiang Wei, Simin Wen, Jiamin Chen, Yuxuan Lei, Yanhui Cheng, Weijuan Huang, Dayan Wang and Yuelong Shu
    Citation: BMC Infectious Diseases 2023 23:211
    Content type: Research Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of Research Articles. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read the submission guidelines of the journal you are submitting to BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology and BMC Infectious Diseases. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, SNAPP, on BMC Immunology, BMC Infectious Diseases, or BMC Biotechnology. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Vaccines for Infectious Diseases: immune mechanisms to vaccine development and clinical implementation" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the standard peer-review process of the journal they are considered in BMC Immunology, BMC Biotechnology, BMC Infectious Diseases and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.