Periodontal vaccine: A dream or reality

Recent advances in cellular and molecular biology have led to the development of new strategies for vaccines against many types of infectious diseases. It has long been recognized that individuals who recovered from a disease developed subsequent resistance to the same. In the late 18th century, Edward Jenner developed and established the principle of vaccination using the cross protection conferred by cowpox virus, which is non-pathogenic in humans. With the rapid growth of microbial genome sequencing and bioinformatics analysis tools we have the potential to examine all the genes and proteins from any human pathogen. This technique has the capability to provide us with new targets for anti-microbial drugs and vaccines. However, to realize this potential new bioinformatics and experimental approaches to select these targets from the myriad of available candidates are required. Vaccination is a process that induces specific immune resistance to a bacterial or viral infection.