VaccineDesigner: A Web-based Tool for Streamlined Multi-epitope Vaccine Design

Abstract

Epitope-based vaccine design is a promising alternative to conventional methods, focusing on selected antigenic epitopes and molecular fragments that can interact with the immune system and elicit appropriate immune responses. Computational approaches are integral parts of the epitope-based vaccine design, implementing a wide spectrum of immune-related analyses, through distributed and heterogeneous interfaces that are technically hard to orchestrate into workflows. To address this challenge, we developed a comprehensive platform, called VaccineDesigner, that streamlines the design of epitope-based vaccines by seamlessly integrating methods for B-cell, CTL, and HTL epitope prediction. VaccineDesigner incorporates additional functionalities, such as multi-epitope vaccine generation, estimation of population coverage, molecular mimicry, and proteasome cleavage that are transparently integrated into the modular architecture, providing a single-access point for rationalized and time/cost-effective multi-epitope vaccines. The source code is freely available under the academic license at:https://github.com/BiolApps/VaccineDesignerand the Web-based interface is accessible at:http://bioinformatics.med.auth.gr/VaccineDesigner