Possibility of designing better vaccines?

A new paper in Biology Methods & Protocols, shows it may be possible to design vaccines that will induce a stronger immune response to infecting pathogens, such as the virus causing COVID-19. In this study, the authors proposed and tested a new bioinformatic approach and tool that allows researchers to select parts of proteins that will elicit a strong immune response. Vaccines developed based on this approach would provide better protection from diseases.

To avoid recognition by a host’s T cells, parasitic organisms eliminate all unnecessary peptides from their proteins. In particular, they mutate these peptides to mimic those present in the proteins of their host species.

In this study, the researchers tested a critical prediction of peptide mimicry theory: they investigated whether they could predict the ability of a parasite’s proteins to provoke an immune response based on the content of peptides absent in their host’s bodies.

Computer simulations showed that the actual T-cell recognition targets had a significantly higher proportion of pentapeptides and hexapeptides not found in human proteins. The new method, grounded in immunological theory, was four times more efficient in detecting the targets in the case of SARS-CoV-2 than currently used methods based on empirical observations.

Reference: “Exposing and Exploiting Host-Parasite Arms Race Clues in SARS-CoV-2: A Principally New Method for Improved T-cell Immunogenicity Prediction, https://academic.oup.com/biomethods/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/biomethods/bpad011