Cécile van Els appointed professor of Vaccinology: Correlates of Protection
With effect from 1 November 2019, the Executive Board has appointed Cécile van Els professor of ‘Vaccinology: Correlates of Protection’ at the Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology of Utrecht ľϸӰ’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.
Effective immune responses
Van Els focuses her research on unravelling the immune response chain of the immune system, leading to effective and sustainable protection against infectious diseases. Key properties of an effective immune response include specificity, quantity, quality and localisation of tissue-resident memory. These so-called correlates of protection differ for each pathogen but are still unknown for most infectious diseases.
Van Els: ‘The control and interactions of immune cells that can specifically address pathogens are central to my current research. We collaborate in an interdisciplinary and (inter)national way. I look forward to establishing further connections between human and veterinary vaccinology and immunology to accelerate the development of knowledge on the generation of sustainable correlates of protection.’
Need for new vaccines
There is a growing demand for knowledge about the effect of vaccines. Within the area of human infectious disease control, vaccines make a major contribution to public health by reducing infectious diseases. Vaccination also has a major social and economic impact in the veterinary field. Emerging (new) infectious diseases in humans and animals require new or improved vaccines. Especially in these times of urbanisation, increasing travel, climate changes and intensive livestock farming, emerging infectious diseases can spread faster and prevention is important.
Vaccine development in the 21st century is no longer a question of trial and error but of rational vaccine design. It is important to demonstrate protective immunity from the earliest stages of development. This will only be possible with knowledge about the correlates of protection and how they can be measured.
Collaboration with RIVM
The ‘Vaccinology: Correlates of Protection’ chair ties in well with the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine's research in several respects: the Infection and Immunity research programme, the One Health research domain and the Molecular Immunology Life Sciences Hub. The focus will lie on combining knowledge about correlates of protection against infectious diseases in humans and animals, to promote applications in vaccinology and to combat (emerging) infectious diseases.
The chair is also anchored within the Centre for Infectious Disease Control of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), an institute with more than 60 years of experience in the field of vaccines and vaccination. According to Van Els, this is an important bonus: ‘It enables me to set up a “Vaccinology: Correlates of Protection” knowledge platform to connect the research and knowledge of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and the RIVM’.
About Van Els
Cécile van Els is an immunologist. She graduated from Utrecht ľϸӰ as a medical biologist and received her doctorate from Leiden ľϸӰ in 1990 with a thesis on transplant immunology. She then came to the RIVM and studied cellular immunity against various infectious diseases including AIDS, measles, whooping cough, meningococcal and pneumococcal disease. At the Netherlands Vaccine Institute (2003-2010), she co-invented a nano-proteomics platform for the discovery of T-cell epitopes.
Van Els returned to the RIVM in 2011, where she helped to shape the vaccine immunology research portfolio. She did so as interim manager at the new Centre for Immunology of Infectious Diseases and Vaccines and as coordinator of the institute-wide core research area ‘Strategic Vaccine Research’. Van Els has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications to her name and has written several expert reviews on correlates of protection in the areas of measles, flu, tuberculosis, whooping cough and pneumococcal disease.