Memories of Santa Fe

The Keystone Symposium on Immunologic Memory took place between 3 and 8 March 2007, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, and was organized by R.A. Seder, S.L. Swain, R. Ahmed and A. Lanzavecchia.![][1] A characteristic of the immune system is its ability to remember past encounters with a pathogen and to mount an altered—usually enhanced—response to a subsequent encounter with the same pathogen. This ‘immunological memory’ is the basis of vaccination, and is of considerable interest to both immunologists and vaccinologists. During the past few years, many studies have contributed to our understanding of the cellular and molecular basis of immunological memory, and there is a sense of excitement about this rapid rate of progress. It was in this context that the Keystone Symposium on Immunologic Memory took place, with the aim of understanding how T and B cells are programmed to elicit and sustain immunity. Here, I review some of the highlights of this meeting.The meeting opened with a keynote address by P. Doherty (Melbourne, Vic, Australia), who reminded us of the history of vaccination and its relationship to immunological memory. He pointed out that most effective vaccines operate through the production of antibodies; however, many clinically important pathogens evade humoral immunity and are instead controlled by cellular immune responses. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to produce effective vaccines against these types of pathogens, presumably owing to the difficulties associated with eliciting appropriate cellular immune responses.One way to prime durable cellular immunity is to use live vectors that express a target protein in the context of an infection. In this regard, D. Barouch (Boston, MA, USA) discussed the use of adenovirus vectors and the problem of pre‐existing immunity to them. He described the development of new strains of adenovirus vaccine from rare serotypes that retain immunogenicity, and … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif