Beyond epitopes: Future and application of computational vaccinology

Abstract

To cite this article: Johannes Söllner (2011) Beyond epitopes: Future and application of computational vaccinology, Human Vaccines,7:7,[795][796][797]

Antidotes, antibody-mediated immunity and the future of pharmaceutical product development

“…Nevertheless, the development of peptide-based immunogens as vaccines has become the subject of renewed interest in recent years, especially with improvements in computational support for vaccine design and in vaccine technology overall. 34 , 35 With regard to B-cell epitope prediction for peptide-based immunogen design, the computational problem is now better understood in terms of physicochemical and biological correlates, 36 , 37 and many new epitope-prediction tools are now available. 38 Furthermore, the realizations that antibody-mediated immunity may pose unacceptable risk of harm in certain cases (e.g., due to antibody-dependent enhancement of disease) and that purely cell-mediated immunity (i.e., based on adaptive T-cell immunity) may be effective in disease prevention suggest the prospect of peptide-based vaccines designed to include primarily (if not exclusively) T-cell epitopes.…”

On the Meaning of Affinity Limits in B-Cell Epitope Prediction for Antipeptide Antibody-Mediated Immunity

“…Historically, these approaches have been developed and pursued mainly for the prevention and control of communicable infectious diseases viewed as public-health problems, which is ever more crucial to adequately address current and anticipated global-health challenges posed by emerging and reemerging pathogens that cause pandemics and panzootics (both of which may be inextricably linked in cases of zoonoses such as avian and swine influenza) [1]. Yet, the envisioned practical applications of antibody-mediated immunity increasingly include therapy for and prophylaxis against diseases such as cancer and hypertension that have traditionally been regarded as lifestyle related rather than infectious [2, 3] although some of these diseases may be at least partly due to infectious agents (e.g., oncogenic viruses) that are thus important targets of antibody-mediated immunity. In a very general sense, possible targets of antibody-mediated immunity include virtually all biomolecules regardless of origin and are often dichotomously categorized as being either self (i.e., autologous, or host associated) or nonself (e.g., pathogen associated), but the distinction is potentially misleading in that a typical vertebrate host normally becomes colonized by microbes acquired from its environment early in life to form a complex biological system (i.e., an ecosystem-like superorganism) comprising both the host and its symbiotically associated microbes [4], such that the concept of self arguably encompasses the host and microbial components of the system.…”