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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2020.08.04.200691

Predicted Cellular Immunity Population Coverage Gaps for SARS-CoV-2 Subunit Vaccines and their Augmentation by Compact Joint Sets

Liu, G.·Carter, B.·Gifford, D. K.
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Abstract

Subunit vaccines induce immunity to a pathogen by presenting a component of the pathogen and thus inherently limit the representation of pathogen peptides for cellular immunity based memory. We find that SARS-CoV-2 subunit peptides may not be robustly displayed by the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) molecules in certain individuals. We introduce an augmentation strategy for subunit vaccines that adds a small number of SARS-CoV-2 peptides to a vaccine to improve the population coverage of pathogen peptide display. Our population coverage estimates integrate clinical data on peptide immunogenicity in convalescent COVID-19 patients and machine learning predictions. We evaluate the population coverage of 9 different subunits of SARS-CoV-2, including 5 functional domains and 4 full proteins, and augment each of them to fill a predicted coverage gap.

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Liu, G., Carter, B., Gifford, D. K.. 2020-08-06. Predicted Cellular Immunity Population Coverage Gaps for SARS-CoV-2 Subunit Vaccines and their Augmentation by Compact Joint Sets. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.04.200691

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