Development of a Multiepitope Vaccine Against SARS-CoV-2: Immunoinformatics Study

Abstract

Background Since the first appearance of SARS-CoV-2 in China in December 2019, the world witnessed the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Due to the high transmissibility rate of the virus, there is an urgent need to design and develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 to prevent more cases affected by the virus. Objective A computational approach is proposed for vaccine design against the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein, as the key target for neutralizing antibodies, and envelope (E) protein, which contains a conserved sequence feature. Methods We used previously reported epitopes of S protein detected experimentally and further identified a collection of predicted B-cell and major histocompatibility (MHC) class II–restricted T-cell epitopes derived from E proteins with an identical match to SARS-CoV-2 E protein. Results The in silico design of our candidate vaccine against the S and E proteins of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated a high affinity to MHC class II molecules and effective results in immune response simulations. Conclusions Based on the results of this study, the multiepitope vaccine designed against the S and E proteins of SARS-CoV-2 may be considered as a new, safe, and efficient approach to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Development of a Multi-Epitope Universal mRNA Vaccine Candidate for Monkeypox, Smallpox, and Vaccinia Viruses: Design and In Silico Analyses

“…The allergenicity prediction via the AlgPred server showed that the multi-epitope vaccine was non-allergen, while the server VaxiJen v2.0 with the default parameters and the threshold 0.4 [ 54 ] demonstrated its probable antigenicity with the antigenic score 0.4656.…”

“…The allergenicity prediction via the AlgPred server showed that the multi-epitope vaccine was non-allergen, while the server VaxiJen v2.0 with the default parameters and the threshold 0.4 [54] demonstrated its probable antigenicity with the antigenic score 0.4656. and subsequently refined by GalaxyRefine (Figure 4). The tool generated five models out of which the one with the better characteristics was selected for the docking analysis.…”

Lessons from COVID-19 Pandemic: A Successful Policy and Practice by Pasteur Institute of Iran

“…More than 100 manuscripts are accessible in NCBI PubMed database (https://pubmed. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) in which the Institute has contributed to SARS-CoV-2 publications, including basic, preclinical and clinical studies [19][20][21][22] , bioinformatics and in silico studies [23][24][25] , case reports [26,27] , reviews, and meta-analysis [18,28] , as well as publications on COVID-19 mechanisms [29,30] , long COVID [31,32] , and COVID-19 diagnosis and therapeutic targets [33][34][35][36] . However, only a few of these publications have been cited in this manuscript.…”

Design, evaluation, and immune simulation of potentially universal multi-epitope mpox vaccine candidate: focus on DNA vaccine

“…VaxiJen v2.0 was applied to predict the antigenicity of the multi-epitope protein construct (Doytchinova and Flower, 2007a,b). The threshold was set as 0.4, and default parameters were employed (Ghafouri et al, 2022).…”