Harnessing the Power of the Immune System: Influenza Vaccines

Because most people have been infected by and/or immunized against influenza, students should know how the immune system responds to the infection and how vaccines protect against disease. Vaccines have played an instrumental role in disease prevention and control since the late 1700s, but the mechanism by which they work is still a black box to many people. Therefore, we designed this lesson to provide an introduction of the immune response to a pathogen, vaccines, and the process involved in testing human-grade vaccines. The course in which this lesson was taught focused on homeostasis and using feedback loops to illustrate factors affecting homeostasis. This lesson incorporates feedback loops to demonstrate how the immune system maintains organismal homeostasis and how vaccines contribute to this. The learning goals of this lesson are to collaboratively generate hypotheses, design experiments, and describe how vaccines harness the power of the immune system to protect against disease. This activity uses various student-centered strategies, including think-pair-share, group discussions, and jigsaw. We have successfully implemented this activity in a biology class for a combination of majors and non-majors, after which students reported being more knowledgeable about how vaccines protect against disease. Further, students can have sophisticated discussions about the benefits and risks of vaccines, which is an especially meaningful outcome, given debates regarding their side effects. In the current climate of a pandemic and the need for an expedited vaccine for SARS-CoV2, a better understanding of how vaccines work and are developed is more important than ever before. Citation: Joy JP, Price RM. 2020.Harnessing the power of the immune system: Influenza vaccines. CourseSource. https://doi.org/10.24918/cs.2020. 53. Editor: Shoshana Katzman, Georgia Gwinnett College Received: 7/4/2020; Accepted: 9/17/2020; Published: 1/15/2021 Copyright: © 2020 Joy and Price. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The author affirms that they either own the copyright to, utilize images under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, or have received written permission to use the text, figures, tables, artwork, abstract, summaries and supporting materials. Conflict of Interest and Funding Statement: None of the authors has a financial, personal, or professional conflict of interest related to this work. Supporting Materials: Supporting Files S1. Stress and Immune System – Introduction Influenza Pre-Class Worksheet; S2. Stress and Immune System – Influenza In-Class Worksheet; S3. Stress and Immune System – Influenza II In-Class Worksheet; S4. Stress and the Immune System – Inflammation Pre-Class Worksheet; S5. Stress and the Immunte System – Pre-class Assignment Grading Rubric; S6. Stress and Immune System – Introduction Influenza Pre-Class Worksheet Answer Key; and S7. Stress and the Immune System – Inflammation Pre-Class Worksheet Answer Key. *Correspondence to: JaimyPJoy@gmail.com CourseSource | www.coursesource. org 2020 | Volume 07 1 Lesson