Databases and data mining for computational vaccinology.

Drugs and vaccines are keys to the effective fight against disease. While the pharmaceutical industry has developed an awesome array of real and virtual approaches to rational drug discovery, the complexity of the immune system hampers attempts to design and develop vaccines in a rational manner. The goal of immunoinformatics (the application of informatics techniques to immunological macromolecules), an emergent sub-discipline of bioinformatics, is to develop computational vaccinology as a potent tool in the quest for new vaccines. Databases and data mining, the two principal weapons at the disposal of the in silico vaccinologist, will be presented in the light of current developments.