Immuno-informatics approach for multi-epitope vaccine designing against SARS-CoV-2

Banerjee, Souvik; Majumder, Kaustav; Gutierrez, Gerardo Jose; Gupta, Debkishore; Mittal, Bharti

The novel Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic has spread a blaze of increasing fatality rates across the world. The dearth of potential vaccines has left the survival of mankind with doubts. The development of multi-epitope vaccine in this current situation could be a possible COVID treatment. We have designed a novel multi-epitope, multi-protein vaccine with different proteins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Corona Virus −2 (SARS-CoV-2) with immuno-informatics approaches, which has been validated in silico to be stable and potential. It has been prepared with Cytotoxic T-cell (T(C)) and Helper T-cell (T(H)) binding epitopes overlapping with B-cell binding epitopes predicted for 6 proteins conserved among 4 different viral strains isolated across the world. Both the humoral and cell-mediated immune responses are ensured due to the presence of T cell and B-cell inducing epitopes along with interferon-gamma inducing epitopes present in the vaccine. The final vaccine construct comprises of an adjuvant at the N terminal, Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte and Helper T Lymphocyte epitopes. The construct showed potential antigenicity and was non-allergic. The molecular docking of the refined, validated tertiary structure model of the vaccine was performed with immune-stimulatory Toll Like Receptors (TLR), TLR-2,3,4. The study of binding energetics of the docked complexes revealed binding interactions of receptor with vaccine. The immune simulation of the vaccine even confirmed the initiation of elevated host immune responses. The efficient translation of the vaccine in an expression vector was confirmed with in silico cloning approach. Certainly, the development of such vaccine candidate could possibly be an effective therapy for COVID-19.