Vaccines Targeting Numerous Coronavirus Antigens, Ensuring Broader Global Population Coverage: Multi-epitope and Multi-patch Vaccines

Abstract

Coronaviruses are causative agents of different zoonosis including SARS, MERS, or COVID-19 in humans. The high transmission rate of coronaviruses, the time-consuming development of efficient anti-infectives and vaccines, the possible evolutionary adaptation of the virus to conventional vaccines, and the challenge to cover broad human population worldwide are the major reasons that made it challenging to avoid coronaviruses outbreaks. Although, a plethora of different approaches are being followed to design and develop vaccines against coronaviruses, most of them target subunits, full-length single, or only a very limited number of proteins. Vaccine targeting multiple proteins or even the entire proteome of the coronavirus is yet to come. In the present chapter, we will be discussing multi-epitope vaccine (MEV) and multi-patch vaccine (MPV) approaches to design and develop efficient and sustainably successful strategies against coronaviruses. MEV and MPV utilize highly conserved, potentially immunogenic epitopes and antigenic patches, respectively, and hence they have the potential to target large number of coronavirus proteins or even its entire proteome, allowing us to combat the challenge of its evolutionary adaptation. In addition, the large number of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles targeted by the chosen specific epitopes enables MEV and MPV to cover broader global population.

Novel ‘GaEl antigenic patches’ identified by ‘reverse epitomics’ approach to design multi-patch vaccines against NIPAH infection, a silent threat to global human health

“…In the present study, we have utilized the novel 'reverse epitomics' approach to design Multi-Patch Vaccine [41][42][43][44]94 . The consensus amino acid sequence of overlapping epitopes is identified as GaEl Ag-Patch.…”

“…Hence these GaEl Ag-Patches cover large number of overlapping epitopes which they could produce upon proteolytic intracellular chop down process by APC. These shortlisted GaEl Ag-Patches originate from all the proteins encoded by NiV, thus targeting its entire proteome 94 . These advantages of the Multi-Patch strategy would enhance the vaccine efficiency and lead to the vaccines that are more targeted/specific and effective.…”

Novel Multi-Epitope Vaccine candidate derived from critically important proteins of Monkeypox isolates

“…The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted September 15, 2022. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.15.507808 doi: bioRxiv preprint vaccine. The EAAAK linker facilitates in domain formation with its rigid nature and hence facilitates the vaccine to gain its final stable folded structure [26][27][28][29] for the CTL MEV. The instability index score of the CTL MEV was 52.65 indicating a stable protein folding under native conditions for CTL MEV.…”

“…The GGGGS linker provides conformational flexibility to the vaccine tertiary structure and hence facilitates conformation folding of the vaccine. The EAAAK linker facilitates in domain formation with its rigid nature and hence facilitates the vaccine to gain its final stable folded structure [26][27][28][29] .The indicating its stable protein folding (Supplementary Table S6).…”

“…C terminals respectively, as adjuvants to design the MEVs[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] . The Human Beta-defensins (hBD) have an important role in the chemotactic activity facilitating the memory T cells, immature dendritic cells and monocytes involved in the degranulation of mast cells.…”