Tracking the pipeline: immunoinformatics and the COVID-19 vaccine design

Abstract

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of data on genomic and proteomic sequences of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) stored in various databases has exponentially grown. A large volume of these data has led to the production of equally immense sets of immunological data, which require rigorous computational approaches to sort through and make sense of. Immunoinformatics has emerged in the recent decades as a field capable of offering this approach by bridging experimental and theoretical immunology with state-of-the-art computational tools. Here, we discuss how immunoinformatics can assist in the development of high-performance vaccines and drug discovery needed to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Immunoinformatics can provide a set of computational tools to extract meaningful connections from the large sets of COVID-19 patient data, which can be implemented in the design of effective vaccines. With this in mind, we represent a pipeline to identify the role of immunoinformatics in COVID-19 treatment and vaccine development. In this process, a number of free databases of protein sequences, structures and mutations are introduced, along with docking web servers for assessing the interaction between antibodies and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein segments as most commonly considered antigens in vaccine design.

An overview of the vaccine platforms to combat COVID-19 with a focus on the subunit vaccines

“…The binding interaction and stability of the construct are simulated by molecular docking. After in silico verification, the designed multi-epitope peptide is expressed in the appropriate expression system ( Bayani et al, 2023 ; Rezaei et al, 2021 ; Tahir Ul Qamar et al, 2020 ). To date, lots of studies have been conducted on the functional mapping of the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL), Th and B-cell epitopes on the SARS-CoV-2 proteins, especially S protein, using immunoinformatics and experimental research ( W.-H. Chen et al, 2020 ; Chen et al, 2021 ).…”

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines, Vaccine Development Technologies, and Significant Efforts in Vaccine Development during the Pandemic: The Lessons Learned Might Help to Fight against the Next Pandemic

“…Designing multi-epitope vaccines by employing immunoinformatic/computation-based approaches for SARS-CoV-2 seems promising, especially when exploring B and T cell epitopes. Immunoinformatic/computation-based multi-epitope vaccines could provide novel and putative vaccine constructs and potential candidates for developing vaccines to tackle COVID-19 [ 137 ]. Scientists have used antigenic epitopes from both the wild-type strain and mutated variants in this direction.…”

Organoid and microfluidics-based platforms for drug screening in COVID-19

“…Several studies have focused on the identification of vaccine candidates for COVID-19 through this approach, which was recently summarized elsewhere. [46] …”