Custommune: a web tool to design personalized and population-targeted vaccine epitopes

Tarek, M.; Elhefnawi, M.; Maricato, J. T.; Diaz, R. S.; Shytaj, I. L.; Savarino, A.

Computational prediction of immunogenic epitopes is a promising platform for therapeutic and preventive vaccine design. A potential target for this strategy is human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1), for which, despite decades of efforts, no vaccine is available. In particular, a therapeutic vaccine devised to eliminate infected cells would represent a key component of cure strategies. HIV peptides designed based on individual viro-immunological data from people living with HIV/AIDS have recently shown able to induce post-therapy viral set point abatement. However, the reproducibility and scalability of this method is curtailed by the errors and arbitrariness associated with manual peptide design as well as by the time-consuming process. We herein introduce Custommune, a user-friendly web tool to design personalized and population-targeted vaccines. When applied to HIV-1, Custommune predicted personalized epitopes using patient specific Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) alleles and viral sequences, as well as the expected HLA-peptide binding strength and potential immune escape mutations. Of note, Custommune predictions compared favorably with manually designed peptides administered in a recent phase II clinical trial (NCT02961829). Furthermore, we utilized Custommune to design preventive vaccines targeted for populations highly affected by COVID-19. The results allowed the identification of peptides tailored for each population and predicted to elicit both CD8+ T-cell immunity and neutralizing antibodies against structurally conserved epitopes of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Overall, our data describe a new tool for rapid development of personalized or population-based immunotherapy against chronic and acute viral infections.