Vaccines are essential public health tools with a favorable safety profile and prophylactic effectiveness that have historically played significant roles in reducing infectious disease burden in populations, when the majority of individuals are vaccinated. The COVID-19 vaccines are expected to have similar positive impacts on health across the globe. While serious allergic reactions to vaccines are rare, their underlying mechanisms and implications for clinical management should be considered to provide individuals with the safest care possible. In this review, we provide an overview of different types of allergic adverse reactions that can potentially occur after vaccination and individual vaccine components capable of causing the allergic adverse reactions. We present the incidence of allergic adverse reactions during clinical studies and through post-authorization and post-marketing surveillance and provide plausible causes of these reactions based on potential allergenic components present in several common vaccines. Additionally, we review implications for individual diagnosis and management and vaccine manufacturing overall. Finally, we suggest areas for future research.

Background: Diagnostic tests for allergy rely on detecting allergen-specific IgE. Component-resolved diagnostics incorporate multiple defined allergen components to improve the quality of diagnosis and patient care. Objective: To develop a new approach for determining sensitization to specific allergen components that utilizes fluorescent protein tetramers for direct staining of IgE on blood basophils by flow cytometry. Methods: Recombinant forms of Lol_p_1 and Lol_p_5 proteins from ryegrass pollen (RGP) and Api_m_1 from honeybee venom (BV) were produced, biotinylated and tetramerized with streptavidin-fluorophore conjugates. Blood samples from 50 RGP-allergic, 41 BV-allergic and 26 controls were incubated with fluorescent protein tetramers for flow cytometric evaluation of basophil allergen binding and activation. Results: Allergen tetramers bound to and activated basophils from relevant allergic patients but not controls. Direct fluorescence staining of Api_m_1 and Lol_p_1 tetramers had greater positive predictive values than basophil activation for BV and RGP allergy, respectively, as defined with receiver operator characteristics (ROC) curves. Staining intensities of allergen tetramers correlated with allergen-specific IgE levels in serum. Inclusion of multiple allergens coupled with distinct fluorochromes in a single tube assay enabled rapid detection of sensitization to both Lol_p_1 and Lol_p_5 in RGP-allergic patients and discriminated between controls, BV-allergic and RGP-allergic patients. Conclusion: Our novel flow cytometric assay, termed CytoBas, enables rapid and reliable detection of clinically relevant allergic sensitization. The intensity of fluorescent allergen tetramer staining of basophils has a high positive predictive value for disease and the assay can be multiplexed for a component-resolved and differential diagnostic test for allergy.

Modern healthcare requires a proactive and individualized response to diseases, combining precision diagnosis and personalized treatment. Accordingly, the approach to patients with allergic diseases encompasses novel developments in the area of personalized medicine, disease phenotyping and endotyping and the development and application of reliable biomarkers. A detailed clinical history and physical examination followed by the detection of IgE immunoreactivity against specific allergens still represents the state of the art. However, nowadays, further emphasis focuses on the optimization of diagnostic and therapeutic standards and a large number of studies have been investigating the biomarkers of allergic diseases, including asthma, atopic dermatitis, allergic rhinitis, food allergy, urticaria and anaphylaxis. Various biomarkers have been developed by omics technologies, some of which lead to a better classification of the distinct phenotypes or endotypes. The introduction of biologicals to clinical practice increases the need for biomarkers for patient selection, prediction of outcomes and monitoring, to allow for an adequate choice of the duration of these costly and long-lasting therapies. Escalating healthcare costs together with questions on the efficacy of the current management of allergic diseases requires further development of a biomarker-driven approach. Here, we review biomarkers in diagnosis and treatment of asthma, atopic dermatitis, allergic rhinitis, viral infections, chronic rhinosinusitis, food allergy, drug hypersensitivity and allergen-immunotherapy with a special emphasis on specific IgE, microbiome and epithelial barrier. In addition, EAACI guidelines on biologicals are discussed within the perspective of biomarkers.