Arya Gandhi
Pronouns: She/her
Research Mentor(s): Yongqun He
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Lab Animal Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, & Bioinformatics / Medicine
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors: Arya Gandhi, Yongqun Oliver He, Anthony Huffman
Abstract
Vaccine informatics is an area of research that is developing. To effectively store large amounts of vaccine literature and data, Dr. He and his colleagues developed VIOLIN: the most comprehensive vaccine database and analysis system to represent vaccines, vaccine safety and efficacy, and immunization modeling. The VIOLIN database is dependent on manual entries to stay updated. The two viruses of focus in this UROP research were the Human Papillomavirus Virus (HPV) and Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus (HRSV). In order to keep the database updated, comparisons between the vaccines in the National Library of Medicine and VIOLIN were first made. When a vaccine that wasn’t entered into VIOLIN was found, additional research using peer-reviewed papers from PubMed was conducted to find the vaccine components, vaccination, and host responses to vaccines. The appropriate information was then entered into specific categories in VIOLIN. Five new HPV vaccines with four new genes and fifteen new HRSV vaccines with six new genes were added to the VIOLIN database. A comparative analysis will also be performed to identify patterns associated with HPV and HRSV vaccines either added by this UROP study or earlier studies. Compiling the vaccines into a centralized database allows for the efficient retrieval of the vaccines through various VIOLIN search programs and provides researchers with data to facilitate the understanding of vaccines to fight infectious diseases. The information is available for web queries on our violinet.org website.
