Teaming Up to Help Vaccine Decision-Making

Researchers at Yale School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have teamed up to make a centralized digital database for results from clinical trials of pneumococcal vaccines.

Their public website, called the Worldwide Index of Serotype Specific Pneumococcal Antibody Responses (WISSPAR), can help researchers, decision-makers, and practitioners visualize a vaccine’s ability to produce an immune response using data from clinical trials. The flexible tool provides a user-friendly way to assess which product and dosing schedule may work best for different age groups. The database is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“There is a tremendous amount of data available for assessing these vaccines from clinical trials,” said Stephanie Perniciaro, associate research scientist in epidemiology (microbial diseases). “We hope that this platform will be a resource for making informed comparisons between different vaccines.”

Pneumococcal vaccines help protect against diseases stemming from certain bacterial infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends vaccines for young children, immunocompromised people, and older adults, but even within these groups there are multiple products from which to choose, including new vaccines, which have limited data for comparison.

The WISSPAR database brings together more than two dozen clinical trials to make decision-making easier. Users can search for trials by vaccine manufacturer, dosing schedule, age group and other criteria, then view the results on detailed, customizable graphs.

The researchers caution that the immunogenicity data cannot be used alone to gauge the effectiveness of the different vaccines. And clinical trials sponsored by different companies could make comparing vaccines more difficult. Still, they said, the easy-to-use website can empower users to make better vaccine decisions.

“Previously, whenever the CDC or their counterparts in other countries needed to make a public health recommendation, they would have to dig through the scientific literature to find the data,” said Dan Weinberger, associate professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases). “WISSPAR helps to streamline that process for pneumococcal vaccines.”

The Yale team also includes Dominic Cooper-Wootton, a software engineer.