Computer-Aided Vaccinology: From Epitope Prediction to Reverse Vaccinology and Beyond

Dear Colleagues,

Vaccine development is one of the most appealing fields in biosciences. Vaccines' goal is to make the immune system able to face future infections. The discovery of vaccination, credited to Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur, has led to global declines in morbidity and mortality from different infectious diseases. However, as the recent SARS-CoV2 virus pandemic has shown us, the rapid evolution of many pathogens constitutes a challenge to vaccine development in terms of host–pathogen interaction(s) and immunity generation. Bioinformatics plays a pivotal role in this research field, driving vaccine improvement in a limited period of time, thanks to advanced soft-computing methods such as artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Exploring computational tools for immunoinformatics and their usage is the central topic of this Special Issue.

“Computer-aided strategies” based on genomics data can be helpful to overcome barriers to vaccine development (e.g., immunity development, host variability, pathogen variability, vaccine safety, and environmental and geographic factors). Vaccinomics, reverse vaccinology (RV), and structure-based vaccine design represent tools able to provide solutions to these challenges. Indeed, these techniques carry vaccinology into a new era of “computer-aided biotechnology” where smart projects are based on prediction-driven investigations instead of time-consuming and expensive large-scale experimental approaches.

In particular, RV represents a milestone technique that has revolutionized the whole field of computational biology, leading to the development of the vaccine against Neisseria meningitidis serogroup B, and may be a promising tool for detecting vaccine candidates for other illnesses, such as AIDS or hepatitis C.

On the other hand, structural vaccinology allows us to map epitopes onto the 3D structure of pathogen proteins, and AI, together with systems biology, is useful in understanding how the immune system functions and responds to vaccines. Public health needs (not only due to the SARS-CoV2 outbreak but also the emergency of multiresistant pathogen bacteria) can be addressed using these novel techniques at an affordable cost. These tools are our weapon to accelerate the battle against harmful and killer pathogens.

We would like to collect research-based articles in which the computational design of vaccines is followed by pre-clinical validation steps, by means of in vitro and/or in vivo studies.

Dr. Irene Righetto
Dr. Francesco Filippini
Guest Editors

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• immunoinformatics
• reverse vaccinology
• vaccinomics
• vaccine design
• epitope prediction
• multi-resistance
• computational biology
• structural biology
• binding site
• computational design
• immunity development
• host variability
• pathogen variability
• vaccine safety