DHIM supporting immunologic investigations and the identification of immune correlates of protection.

Evidence suggesting that immune responses to dengue virus (DENV) have the potential for both beneficial and detrimental effects on the outcome of infection is a concern for dengue vaccine development. There is thus a great need to define measures of DENV-specific immune responses that reliably indicate when immunity is protective. The existence of 4 main DENV serotypes and the difficulty in defining which individuals have been exposed and to which viruses present challenges to defining immune correlates of protective immunity against DENV in field efficacy studies; experimental infection studies in humans offer a pathway to address these challenges.