About this Research Topic
Unless we can develop a COVID-19 vaccine that can provide long-term sterilizing immunity, SARS-CoV-2 infections will likely become seasonal and require yearly immunizations, as is the case for influenza. To develop such a vaccine, we would need to consider the mechanism of interaction of the virus with the host, and the host’s response to the vaccine. Components of the innate immune system, such as monocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells, granulocytes, and other immune cell types demand greater attention. Moreover, vaccines can induce alternative activation of immune subsets, leading to a vaccine-induced protective immune response, which needs to be studied further and better understood. SARS-CoV-2 presents a slight difference in its infection pattern, which depends on multiple factors, such as age, sex, medical status, past infections with other coronaviruses, co-morbidities, and host genetics. This needs to be understood in detail to define the universal efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. This Research Topic offers a window of opportunity for coalescing this much-needed information, which will be instrumental to the development of more durable COVID-19 vaccines in the future.
We welcome the submission of Original Research articles, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Perspective articles, Opinion articles, and Commentaries around the following topics, which include but are not limited to:
• Identification of innate immune responses that correlate to protection.
• Elucidating the roles of major innate immune subset responses, which correlate to vaccine efficacy.
• Innate immune responses during SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, including DCs-mediated antigen presentation, macrophage-mediated response, granulocytes response, and others.
• Factors that affect the functions of innate immune cells during SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.
• Innate immune responses observed with endemic coronaviruses and in SARS-CoV-2 infected subjects or vaccinated individuals.
Keywords: innate immunity, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, vaccine
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.