Technologies for assessing vaccine responses in the very young

Many vaccines are administered to young children in order to prevent infectious diseases early in life. At the same time, most of these vaccines are not developed specifically with the immune system of young children in mind and our understanding of how newborn immune systems differ from adult counterparts is incomplete. The main reason for this lack of understanding stems from the ethical and logistical difficulties in obtaining samples from young children as well as the challenges associated with the small volume samples available. Here I review some recent developments made in this field and discuss their implications for studying vaccine responses in young children and developing better vaccines, tailored to this important population of susceptible individuals in the future.