Current poultry vaccines are based either on live attenuated organisms
or on killed organisms. Future vaccines also may be based on deletion
mutants, live viral or bacterial vectors that express foreign genes,
and naked DNA. Vaccines have different purposes, depending on the dise
ase, which govern their intrinsic characteristics. Improvement of vacc
ine efficacy can be addressed by modifications of the vaccine and its
administration, modifications in the capacity of the host to mount an
immune response, and modifications of environmental factors. The conce
pt of ''designer vaccines'' for matching vaccines that deliver specifi
c antigenic peptides to chickens with the MHC haplotype that best pres
ents those peptides to T cells is discussed.