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In November 2010, the Royal Society hosted a discussion meeting to review the recent successes and the future of vaccines, followed by a workshop on how to accelerate the development of vaccines, held at the Royal Society's new Kavli Conference Centre.

The meeting, organised by Professor Brian Greenwood and Professor Adrian Hill, gathered over twenty distinguished speakers from around the world. The journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B has now brought together the papers presented during the meeting in a new themed issue.

Co-edited by Brian Greenwood, the themed issue "New vaccines for global health" opens with a broad account of the importance of vaccines in the human and animal world, emphasising the importance of cross-disciplinary collaborations, like the One Health Initiative established to unite human and veterinary medicine, and stressing the main areas in which advances must be made to exploit the full potential of vaccines.

Increased support towards the fundamental science behind design and delivery methods for vaccines, a faster transition between laboratory-based discoveries and practical applications, a widened availability of new and existing vaccines worldwide and increase in the public`s confidence in their safety and efficacy are at the core of the articles presented in this issue, carefully selected to give the best possible overviews of where the world stands now in matter of immunisation procedures, vaccine availability and frontline research.

Ranging from malaria to HIV, livestock diseases to cancer and other non-infectious diseases, the introduction by Professor Greenwood touches the fields where vaccine research is active and gives the reader a taste of the in-depth discussion presented in the following articles.

The full series can be accessed online at: