Immunoinformatics and molecular docking studies reveal a novel Multi-Epitope peptide vaccine against pneumonia infection

Abstract

Pneumonia is a major endemic disease around the world, and an effective vaccine is the need of the hour to fight against the disease. When there are no appropriate antiviral and associated therapies available, vaccine development becomes even more essential. Therefore, in the present study, a variety of immunoinformatics techniques was utilized to develop a novel multi-epitope vaccine that targets the highly immunodominant type 3 fimbrial protein of Klebsiella pneumoniae, the causal organism for pneumonia. The putative B and T cell epitopes were predicted from the protein and screened for antigenicity, toxicity, allergenicity, and cross-reactivity with human proteomes. Subsequently, the selected epitopes were joined with the help of linkers to form a robust vaccine construct. In addition, an adjuvant was applied to the N-terminal of the construct to improve the immunogenicity of the vaccine. The physicochemical properties, solubility, the secondary and tertiary structure of the final vaccine were also established. MD simulations for 100 ns were employed to assess the stability of the vaccine-TLR-2 docked complex. The final vaccine was optimized and cloned in pET28a (+) vector with His-tag to achieve maximum vaccine protein expression for ease of purification. Immune simulation results indicated the potency of this vaccine candidate as a probable therapeutic agent. In conclusion, the overall results of various immunoinformatics tools and methods employed revealed that the constructed multi-epitope vaccine exhibits a high potential for stimulating both B and T-cells immune responses against pneumonia infection. However, experimental immunological studies are required to corroborate the viability of the novel multi-epitope construct as a commercial vaccine.