Designing a multi-epitope peptide based vaccine against SARS-CoV-2

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in 16,114,449 cases with 646,641 deaths from the 217 countries, or territories as on July 27th 2020. Due to multifaceted issues and challenges in the implementation of the safety and preventive measures, inconsistent coordination between societies-governments and most importantly lack of specific vaccine to SARS-CoV-2, the spread of the virus that initially emerged at Wuhan is still uprising after taking a heavy toll on human life. In the present study, we mapped immunogenic epitopes present on the four structural proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and we designed a multi-epitope peptide based vaccine that, demonstrated a high immunogenic response with a vast application on world’s human population. On codon optimization and in-silico cloning, we found that candidate vaccine showed high expression in E. coli and immune simulation resulted in inducing a high level of both B-cell and T-cell mediated immunity. The results predicted that exposure of vaccine by administrating three injections significantly subsidized the antigen growth in the system. The proposed candidate vaccine found promising by yielding desired results and hence, should be validated by practical experimentations for its functioning and efficacy to neutralize SARS-CoV-2.

Antimicrobial and Amyloidogenic Activity of Peptides. Can Antimicrobial Peptides Be Used against SARS-CoV-2?

“…To evaluate the effectiveness of peptide vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the frequencies of the HLA haplotypes can be used to predict the coverage of the developed vaccine. At the same time, peptides are evaluated based on the frequency of HLA haplotypes or HLA alleles in the target population, peptides with undesirable properties are filtered out, which are expected to be glycosylated, identical to peptides in the human proteome, or rapidly degraded [ 268 ] Using in silico methods, epitopes of B cells, T cells, and IFN-gamma present on four structural proteins of the virus were mapped, and multi-epitope peptide-based vaccine was developed [ 269 ]. It should be taken into account when developing a peptide vaccine that some peptides can provoke an increased production of interleukin 6.…”

Genome-wide analysis of Indian SARS-CoV-2 genomes to identify T-cell and B-cell epitopes from conserved regions based on immunogenicity and antigenicity

“…Moreover, for the ease of the readers, all the details related to the 125 CCnRs, 92 MHC-I and MHC-II restricted T-cell epitopes and 61 B-cell epitopes are provided in the supplementary as an excel file , the link of which is given in Table S6. Additionally, a list of MHC-I and MHC-II restricted T-cell and B-cell epitopes for SARS-CoV-2 as collected from different sources in the literature like [26] , [27] , [17] , [28] , [16] , [15] , [20] , [24] , [23] , [29] , [30] , [31] , [32] , [33] , [25] are reported in Table 5 . For space constraint, 3 of each MHC-I and MHC-II restricted T-cell and B-cell epitopes from each paper are mentioned in this table while the list of all the MHC-I and MHC-II restricted T-cell and B-cell epitopes are given in the supplementary as an excel file as given in Table S6 .…”

“…Apart from Spike, they have identified epitopes derived from NSP3, 3CL-pro, NSP8, NSP9 and NSP10 proteins to be highly likely candidates for vaccine design. There are other works like [26] , [27] , [28] , [29] , [30] , [31] , [32] , [33] as well pertaining to epitope identification in SARS-CoV-2 for vaccine design.…”

Perspectives in Peptide-Based Vaccination Strategies for Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Pandemic

“…Furin proteases are members of serine protein convertases (PCs). Usually, PCs cleave precursor proteins at specific single or paired basic amino acids within the motif (arginine/lysine(R/K)-(2X)n-(R/K))↓( Seidah and Chrétien, 1999 ; Maret et al, 2012 ), where n stands for spacer amino acids and ↓ to delineate the cleavage site. They are able to cleave specifically viral envelope glycoproteins, increasing cell membrane fusion ( Gui et al, 2017 ; Pallesen et al, 2017 ; Song et al, 2018 ; Coutard et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The continuous research has however allowed to overcome many of these obstacles. For example, the problem of low immunogenicity is now overcome thanks to several multiple antigenic peptides, moreover, different innovative administration routes (e.g., intradermal, oral, intranasal) ( Wang et al, 2015 ; Waghule et al, 2019 ) and formulations (e.g., liposomes, nanoparticles) are now able to impair peptide degradation ( Singh et al, 2020 ). Many efforts have yet to be made to obtain a valid peptide-based vaccine, but currently different peptide-based vaccines are under investigation in clinical trials for several diseases as reported in Table 2 and seven of them are actually in phase III clinical trials.…”