Better Deader

Traditional strategies for designing live attenuated vaccines have been empirical, involving repeated passage of viral and bacterial strains through nonhuman cell lines to select for mutations that reduce pathogenicity, an approach that rarely provides insight into the molecular basis for attenuation. Thus, techniques for generating live attenuated strains have been hit or miss.

Two recent papers published in Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences illustrate methods that could potentially be applied to designing live attenuated vaccines for a wide range of pathogens...