A novel multi-epitope peptide vaccine
Developing a synthetic peptide epitope multicomponent vaccine that induces the formation of neutralizing antibodies to four serotypes of dengue virus, and does not contribute to strengthening antibody-dependent infection.
Developed within the framework of epitope vaccine for the prevention of dengue fever consists of a mixture of peptide immunogens mimicking the neutralizing epitopes of the virus coat protein E of 4 types of dengue virus serotypes.
Methods of epitope technology are to be used for the design of peptide immunogens that accumulates in a single set of methods of bioinformatics, molecular immunology, viruses’ molecular biology and peptide chemistry.
The structure of the synthetic peptides designed to exclude the presence of elements responsible for the development of an immunopathological state – of antibody-dependent infection strengthening.
Synthetic peptides mimic only functionally significant fragments of the coat protein, which are able to induce the formation of neutralizing antibodies only.
Virus-specific antibodies are not able to neutralize the virus, but are capable of inducing antibody-dependent enhancement of infection after immunization with the peptide vaccine, which is a unique advantage of the peptide vaccine compared with all the vaccines in which the E protein of dengue virus is present.
Another advantage of peptide vaccines is their synthetic nature; peptide antigens are developed in a few days on the automatic peptide synthesizer, which allows producing a new synthetic antigen without the participation of living biosystem-producers.
Epitope technology has been successfully used to create a peptide vaccine against Ebola that successfully passed the second phase of clinical trials at the end of 2016.