Vaccines are the cornerstones of modern medicine saving millions of lives every year. Due to the fast progress in better understanding the biology of certain pathogens coupled with recent technological advancements in the fields of immunology, structural biology and nanomaterial development, we have entered a new golden age of vaccinology. This meeting will focus on presenting state-of-the-art vaccine technologies (mRNA, viral vectors, protein nanoparticles, adjuvants), recent advancements in understanding (and potentially manipulating) vaccine-induced immune responses and key aspects of structure-based antigen design that allows us to develop better vaccine immunogens. Combining these overlapping and strongly synergistic aspects of vaccine development we aim to foster collaborations between conference participants that may result in novel, very effective vaccines in the future. Most currently used vaccines have been developed by empirical research without the involvement of immunologists, structural biologists or biomedical engineers. It has become evident in recent years that the empirical approach is not sufficient for successful vaccine development against hard-to-target pathogens. To successfully combat these pathogens we need to better understand how we can induce protective immune responses against them and need to develop better adjuvants, vaccine platforms or immunization schemes. This 'combined' approach requires a tight cooperation between interdisciplinary groups of scientists that we aim to bring together in this Keystone meeting. Other Keystone meetings in the fields of immunology can potentially synergize with our proposed symposium.