CAID: An App to Facilitate Identification of Candidate Correlates of Protection in Vaccine Study Data

About the Seminar

In this talk, Dr Violet Warwick and Dr Emmanuel Olawale Olamijuwon introduce CAID, a no-code, user-friendly web application tailored to the discovery of immune correlates of protection. The CAID app allows users to leverage machine-learning for feature selection to identify key immune attributes relevant to an outcome of interest.  This approach succeeds even with a great many attributes, which could be both immune and sociodemographic factors. 

These features can then be taken forward into classical regression models, including mixed models, to evaluate their statistical significance.

Patterns in the data can be visualised using correlograms, boxplots, scatter plots etc. Related datasets can be appended together, missingness identified and subsets defined.

As it is designed to run on the least computationally intensive devices, it may be particularly useful for researchers in low and middle income countries. However, it should help researchers everywhere accelerate the vaccine development pipeline.

About the Speakers

Dr Violet Warwick is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews with a background in biochemistry and a PhD in drug design. She has extensive experience as a clinical trialist and has since gained additional qualifications in computing, enabling her to apply data science techniques to medical challenges. Her current research focuses on using machine learning to identify immune correlates of protection (CoP), which can serve as predictors of vaccine efficacy and inform decision-making in clinical development, licensing, and deployment.

Dr Emmanuel Olawale Olamijuwon is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews.  He has over five years’ experience analysing clinical, survey, and digital data, and he is particularly interested in the development of digital platforms that harness computational approaches to address pressing global health challenges, including vaccine development and antimicrobial resistance. Emmanuel also leads workshops across Africa to build capacity in data analysis and visualisation.