An open-ended plea for the development of a global database of HIV vaccine responses

PURPOSE OF REVIEW The purpose of this review is to describe a critical need of the HIV research community for a globally accessible database of HIV vaccine responses that stores data from multiple assay platforms in the form of lists of correlates of immune protection and vaccine efficacy. This is not a detailed review but a first step toward developing a dialogue among investigators and funding organizations to build upon existing resources to efficiently develop a HIV vaccine response and correlates database. We also discuss examples of databases that complement our needs and could be integrated into our proposed database requirements. RECENT FINDINGS Several vaccine-related databases that store information at the study level currently exist, however, at the present time, a correlates of immune protection database does not exist. SUMMARY Here, we discuss the scientific climate surrounding HIV vaccine development with the evolution of systems biology approaches, the problems at hand for analyzing and harmonizing datasets generated from preclinical and clinical studies, and the curation and accessibility of useful information to model outcomes. We also compare key database requirements of a few existing globally accessible databases and provide several illustrative correlate database submission and utilization examples.