Time for T? Immunoinformatics addresses vaccine design for neglected tropical and emerging infectious diseases

Abstract

Vaccines have been invaluable for global health, saving lives and reducing healthcare costs, while also raising the quality of human life. However, newly emerging infectious diseases (EID) and more well-established tropical disease pathogens present complex challenges to vaccine developers; in particular, neglected tropical diseases, which are most prevalent among the world’s poorest, include many pathogens with large sizes, multistage life cycles and a variety of nonhuman vectors. EID such as MERS-CoV and H7N9 are highly pathogenic for humans. For many of these pathogens, while their genomes are available, immune correlates of protection are currently unknown. These complexities make developing vaccines for EID and neglected tropical diseases all the more difficult. In this review, we describe the implementation of an immunoinformatics-driven approach to systematically search for key determinants of immunity in newly available genome sequence data and design vaccines. This approach holds promise for the development of 21st century vaccines, improving human health everywhere.

Keywords:

• Brugia malayi
• computational vaccinology
• EID
• EpiMatrix
• filarial
• immunogenicity
• immunoinformatics
• immunomics
• JanusMatrix
• MHC
• NTD
• T cell
• TCR
• tregitope

Financial & competing interests disclosure

AS De Groot is CEO, CSO of EpiVax. FE Terry, L Moise and R Martin are employees of EpiVax. In addition, L Moise holds options in EpiVax and AS De Groot is a majority stockholder. This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Research Grant U19 AI082642. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funded the development of the iVAX website and the application of the suite of computational vaccinology tools to Neglected Tropical Diseases. The NIH/NIAID Filariasis Research Reagent Resource Center provided funding to M Torres, N Pilotte and SA Williams and provided all Brugia parasite materials. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Key issues

• New immunoinformatics tools have been developed that address critical problems in vaccine design.

• These tools have been extensively validated in preclinical models.

• The design of vaccines for neglected tropical diseases would benefit from expanded use of these tools.

Notes