Compared with many other vaccines, current vaccines against influenza provide only limited protection. Here, the authors describe the challenges and recent attempts at generating T cell-based vaccines. It may be important to combine T cell-based vaccines with antibody-based vaccines to provide long-lasting immunity across influenza virus strains.

An optimal immune response to influenza virus strikes a balance between protective antiviral immune mechanisms and detrimental immunopathology. Here, the authors review the immune mechanisms responsible for each side of this balance and how this may inform future vaccine design.

Here, Rongbin Zhou and colleagues review the different types of damage-associated molecular pattern (DAMP) that trigger sterile inflammation via pattern recognition receptors. The authors group these DAMPs on the basis of whether they arise from inside cells, from neighbouring cells or from distant tissues, and they discuss the relevance of such DAMPs in various inflammatory disease settings.

Genome editing approaches can be used to confer immune-evasive properties to allogeneic cellular immunotherapies, with the aim of achieving persistent responses and efficiencies that are comparable to those of autologous chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapies. This Perspective discusses how current knowledge about viral or tumour immune evasion could be incorporated into the design of off-the-shelf tumour-specific T and NK cells for the production of cost-effective and scalable cancer immunotherapies.