Artificial intelligence predicts the immunogenic landscape of SARS-CoV-2 leading to universal blueprints for vaccine designs
Brandon Malone, Boris Simovski, Clément Moliné, Jun Cheng, Marius Gheorghe, Hugues Fontenelle, Ioannis Vardaxis, Simen Tennøe, Jenny-Ann Malmberg, Richard Stratford & Trevor Clancy
Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 22375 (2020)
Abstract
The global population is at present suffering from a pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the novel coronavirus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The goal of this study was to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict blueprints for designing universal vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, that contain a sufficiently broad repertoire of T-cell epitopes capable of providing coverage and protection across the global population. To help achieve these aims, we profiled the entire SARS-CoV-2 proteome across the most frequent 100 HLA-A, HLA-B and HLA-DR alleles in the human population, using host-infected cell surface antigen presentation and immunogenicity predictors from the NEC Immune Profiler suite of tools, and generated comprehensive epitope maps. We then used these epitope maps as input for a Monte Carlo simulation designed to identify statistically significant “epitope hotspot” regions in the virus that are most likely to be immunogenic across a broad spectrum of HLA types. We then removed epitope hotspots that shared significant homology with proteins in the human proteome to reduce the chance of inducing off-target autoimmune responses.
