I wish to thank the Society for inviting me to give the Introductory Talk in this Symposium. It is going to centre around what might be called ‘epitope specific’ immunization and I want to draw your attention to a number of factors which will be bound to affect any new approach to the development of vaccines. To begin with, it is now clear that complex antigens, such as those associated with parasites, present many different epitopes to the immune system. These epitopes are ‘seen’ by different cell types using different receptors and epitope recognition can activate a number of different effector systems.
