Joy Hu
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Yongqun He
Research Mentor School/College/Department: / 0
Program:
Authors: Joy Hu, Yongqun He
Session: Session 4: 1:40 pm – 2:30 pm
Poster: 75
Abstract
Vaccines have been crucial in public health by preventing infectious diseases through stimulating the immune system to fight off pathogens. Even though vaccines are most commonly associated with infectious viral or bacterial diseases such as polio or COVID-19, new research on vaccines preventing parasitic diseases, such as malaria, is emerging. Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite (plasmodium) transmitted by infected mosquitoes, causing high fevers, flu-like illness, and sometimes death. Not commonly fatal in the United States, malaria remains a deadly disease especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, making vaccines central to disease prevention. There have recently been intensive studies on malaria vaccine development. The Vaccine Investigation OnLine Information Network (VIOLIN), a web-based comprehensive vaccine resource, allows the research and analysis of vaccines relating to human pathogens. In this UROP study, we performed systematic collection, annotation, and analysis of various malaria vaccines using the VIOLIN vaccine knowledge base as the research platform. First, clinical trials and vaccine ontology (VO) IDs relating to malaria were filtered and mapped onto a spreadsheet. After verifying the matching VO vaccines and clinical trial treatments, the vaccines not yet in the VIOLIN database were sorted. PubMed is also used to find more malaria-related vaccines, since it does not exclude non-human trials and gives a more extensive list of current malaria vaccine information. In total, this UROP study has identified and added over 40 malaria vaccines to the VIOLIN database. Furthermore, we have analyzed these >40 malaria vaccines together with the existing malaria vaccines already there in the VIOLIN, resulting in significant insights on current malaria vaccine study and providing perspectives for more future research. The malaria vaccine data are stored in VIOLIN using the web-based literature mining and curation system that allows registered users to input new vaccine information that will appear in the Vaxquery visible to website users.
