New York Times: Letter to the Editor: For Progress on Vaccine
Wayne Koff, president and chief executive of the Human Vaccines Project

“…Despite decades of work and billions in investment, vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis, cancers, neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases have evaded our best efforts, and we remain woefully unprepared for the next pandemic. This lack of progress is largely due to a fundamental gap in our understanding of how our immune system prevents and controls disease. Rather than primarily funding individual efforts on single diseases, we need significant resources focused on decoding the human immune system, on a moonshot-level scale of the Human Genome Project. Technological advances in biomedicine and computer sciences have provided the tools necessary to undertake this effort, but we must act before these diseases take an even greater toll” (9/28).