Proof of principle for epitope-focused vaccine design
Bruno E. Correia, John T. Bates, Rebecca J. Loomis, Gretchen Baneyx, Chris Carrico, Joseph G. Jardine, Peter Rupert, Colin Correnti, Oleksandr Kalyuzhniy, Vinayak Vittal, Mary J. Connell, Eric Stevens, Alexandria Schroeter, Man Chen, Skye MacPherson, Andreia M. Serra, Yumiko Adachi, Margaret A. Holmes, Yuxing Li, Rachel E. Klevit, Barney S. Graham, Richard T. Wyatt, David Baker, Roland K. Strong, James E. Crowe et al.
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Nature 507, 201–206 (13 March 2014) doi:10.1038/nature12966
Received 01 July 2013 Accepted 19 December 2013 Published online 05 February 2014
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Abstract
Abstract• Accession codes• References• Author information• Extended data figures and tables• Supplementary information
Vaccines prevent infectious disease largely by inducing protective neutralizing antibodies against vulnerable epitopes. Several major pathogens have resisted traditional vaccine development, although vulnerable epitopes targeted by neutralizing antibodies have been identified for several such cases. Hence, new vaccine design methods to induce epitope-specific neutralizing antibodies are needed. Here we show, with a neutralization epitope from respiratory syncytial virus, that computational protein design can generate small, thermally and conformationally stable protein scaffolds that accurately mimic the viral epitope structure and induce potent neutralizing antibodies. These scaffolds represent promising leads for the research and development of a human respiratory syncytial virus vaccine needed to protect infants, young children and the elderly. More generally, the results provide proof of principle for epitope-focused and scaffold-based vaccine design, and encourage the evaluation and further development of these strategies for a variety of other vaccine targets, including antigenically highly variable pathogens such as human immunodeficiency virus and influenza.