🧬 From Patient to Precision: Unlocking the Secrets of Vaccine Effectiveness 🧪

What makes a vaccine truly excellent, especially for people who don’t usually respond well to vaccines, like older adults? At WIMR, Dr Kerrie Sandgren, Prof Tony Cunningham and their team are tackling this question by applying precision medicine technologies in an innovative way - not to personalise treatments, but to understand deeply how vaccines work and how they can be made more effective for everyone.

In the first image, we see a surgeon at Westmead Hospital removing a lymph node from a breast cancer patient who bravely chose to contribute to research. In the second, that same tissue is used to uncover how the shingles vaccine achieves its exceptional performance - using state-of-the-art tools like the Xenium spatial transcriptomics platform, part of the PrecisionGo technology pipeline at the The Westmead Institute for Medical Research.

Why is this research groundbreaking?

🔹 It investigates why some vaccines outperform others, beyond trial-and-error.

🔹 It explores how powerful adjuvants (vaccine enhancers) can improve future vaccines.

🔹 It uses donated human lymph nodes - the command centres of immune response - so we can learn what happens in real human biology.

Every donated sample is precious. With access to leading technologies at WIMR, we’re extracting as much insight as possible to help develop faster, better, more inclusive vaccines - and ensure no one is left behind.

Because when someone says yes to donating tissue, they deserve to know that their sample could help save countless lives.

Read more here: https://wimr.org.au/research-groups/vaccines-and-adjuvants-group/