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

  1. Abhishek Singh
  2. Mukesh Thakur
  3. Lalit Kumar Sharma
  4. Kailash Chandra

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Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has resulted so far 14,395,16 confirmed cases with 85,711 deaths from the 212 countries, or territories. Due to multifacet issues and challenges in implementation of the safety & preventive measures, inconsistent coordination between societies-governments and most importanly lack of specific vaccine to SARS-CoV-2, the spread of Wuhan originated virus is still uprising after taking a heavy toll on human life. In the present study, we mapped several immunogenic epitopes (B-cell, T-cell, and IFN-gamma) over the entire structural proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and by applying various computational and immunoinformatics approaches, we designed a multi-epitope peptide based vaccine that predicted high immunogenic response in the largest proportion of world’s human population. To ensure high expression of the recombinant vaccine in E. coli , codon optimization and in-silico cloning were also carried out. The designed vaccine with high molecular affinity to TLR3 and TLR4, was found capable to initiate effective innate and adaptive immune response. The immune simulation also suggested uprising high levels of both B-cell and T-cell mediated immunity which on subsequent exposure cleared antigen from the system. The proposed vaccine found promising by yielding desired results and hence, should be tested by practical experimentations for its functioning and efficacy to neutralize SARS-CoV-2.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.15.040618: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    The lack of knowledge regarding the response of the immune system against viral infection is one of the major limitations in the path of vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2. This study is the piolt attempt in describing the potential immunogenic target over the structural proteins and proposes a novel multi-epitope vaccine construct, by providing new rays of hope in the initial phase of vaccine development. Certain criteria like poor antigenicity, allergenicity, low affinity towards the immune cells, autoimmunity and oversize that could influence the effectiveness, have been evaluated on the proposed vaccine construct following various computational and immunoinformatics approach. The retrieved structural proteins and their antigenicity score suggested that the Envelop protein is the most potent protein to generate immune response considering its role in viral assembly. Since, immunity against any pathogen is prominently dependent, how it gets recognized by B cells and T cells. We identified epitopes corresponding to B cells and T cells in each structural protein so that both humoral and cellular immunity can be induced with the exposure of vaccine construct. The proposed vaccine construct is designed based on the epitopes that have been selected with the most robust criteria,e.g. their nature of antigenic, non-allergic, 100% conserved among the target proteins, their affinity for multiple alleles, no homology with any of the human proteins, their worldwide coverage of human p...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.15.040618 on bioRxiv