TMED11 Conference
Shaping Future Healthcare with Clinical Research and Personalised Prescribing
Join us at the historic Guildhall, Derry-Londonderry for the 11th TMED Conference – a leading international event in translational medicine bringing together clinical researchers, academics, industry partners and healthcare innovators from across the UK and Europe.
Poster 6- The Computational design of peptide- based vaccine candidate for Lassa Fever
Authors: Anna Friel, A1., Gavin Markey, A1., Priyank Shukla, A1., David Gibson, A1.
Affiliations: Personalised Medicine Centre, School of Medicine, Ulster University; Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 7JL
Background/ Introduction: Lassa Fever is an acute viral haemorrhagic illness endemic to Western Africa. It affects approximately 200,000 people annually with a 15% case fatality rate in hospitalised patients. Despite growing recognition of clinical relevance and prevalence, there is currently no licensed vaccines targeting this virus. This study aims to identify immunogenic peptide vaccine candidates for Lassa Fever using a comprehensive immunoinformatic pipeline. This approach targets epitopes that are antigenic, non-allergenic, non-autoimmune, structurally accessible, broadly conserved, and have high population coverage.
Material & Methods: The Lassa Fever glycoprotein (GP) and nucleoprotein (NP)sequences were retrieved from the National Centre for Biotechnology Information database and screened for antigenicity using VaxiJen v2.0. B-cell and T-cell epitopes were predicted using ABCPred, BcePred and Tepitool. Major histocompatibility complex -I epitopes were screened for immunogenicity using the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) immunogenicity predictor. Epitope clustering was performed using IEDB Epitope Cluster Analysis tool, followed by in-house filtering, antigenicity analysis using VaxiJen v2.0, allergenicity analysis using AllerTop v2.1 and autoimmunity analysis using UniprotKB. Final epitopes were assessed for population coverage, conservation, surface accessibility and binding affinity using IEDB tools, Consurf, UCSF Chimera and ClusPro. Finally, molecular simulation was performed using GROMACS.
Results: One GP consensus sequence and three NP epitopes were shown to be antigenic, non-allergenic, non-toxic and non-autoimmune inducing. Population coverage demonstrated strong coverage ranging between 77.76-99.8% globally, and 78.44-99.6% in Western African. The GP epitope showed consistently high conservation with complete sequence representation at ≥70% identity. The NP epitopes showed greater variability, with two candidate showing similar high conservation, whilst one epitope showed substantially lower conservation at higher identity; thresholds, was therefore excluded from further analysis.
Conclusion: This study identified three promising peptide vaccine candidates for Lassa Fever. These findings provide a foundation for further experimentation, particularly in-vitro validation; and demonstrate potential of an immune-informatics approach in accelerating vaccine design.
