An overview of in silico vaccine design against different pathogens and cancer

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Due to overcome the hardness of the vaccine design, computational vaccinology is emerging widely. Prediction of T cell and B cell epitopes, antigen processing analysis, antigenicity analysis, population coverage, conservancy analysis, allergenicity assessment, toxicity prediction, and protein-peptide docking are important steps in the process of designing and developing potent vaccines against various viruses and cancers. In order to perform all of the analyses, several bioinformatics tools and online web servers have been developed. Scientists must take the decision to apply more suitable and precise servers for each part based on their accuracy.

Areas covered

In this review, a wide-range list of different bioinformatics tools and online web servers has been provided. Moreover, some studies were proposed to show the importance of various bioinformatics tools for predicting and developing efficient vaccines against different pathogens including viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi as well as cancer.

Expert opinion

Immunoinformatics is the best way to find potential vaccine candidates against different pathogens. Thus, the selection of the most accurate tools is necessary to predict and develop potent preventive and therapeutic vaccines. To further evaluation of the computational and in silico vaccine design, in vitro/in vivo analyses are required to develop vaccine candidates.

KEYWORDS:

• Computational vaccinology
• T cell
• B cell
• bioinformatics tools
• epitope prediction tools

Article highlights

• Multiepitope vaccine is a major technology for deletion of immunity against undesirable epitopes

• Developing epitope-driven vaccines requires a precise knowledge of the amino acid sequence of the target immunogenic protein. Therefore, the reverse vaccinology (RV) method was developed to control, prevent, and treat infectious diseases and tumors.

• Multiepitope vaccines have several benefits including stimulation of immune responses against conserved and favorable epitopes, enhancement of safety, improvement of the breadth and potency of vaccine through engineering and prediction of the epitopes, and expansion of the processing and presenting of the antigens by antigen-presenting cells through coverage a variety number of immunogenic cytotoxic T cell epitopes in a single recombinant DNA or protein construct

• Progress in recognizing T-cell epitopes, and understanding the mechanisms of processing and presentation of antigens by both MHC class I and II pathways are essential for rational designing of artificial polyepitope vaccines

• Several multiepitope-based vaccines have been designed and developed against viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi as well as breast cancer

Declaration of interest

The authors have no 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. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

K Kardani: Investigation, Writing- Original draft, Writing – review & editing.

A Bolhassani: Conceptualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing-review & editing.

A Namvar: Investigation, Writing-review & editing

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.