Function

PEPVAC is a tool aimed to the development of fully covering multi-epitope vaccines against pathogenic organisms based on genome wide predictions of promiscous MHCI-restricted epitopes.

Description

T-cell epitopes are first anticipated based on their binding to HLA molecules using profile-matrices, and then filtered for immunoproteasomal cleavage using a probabilistic model. HLA molecules present many allelic variants with distinct peptides specificities, and thus peptide binding predictions are given for a selected set of HLA alleles covering a whole population including all major ethnities. These HLA alleles are grouped in sets (superantigenes) whose predicted binding peptides are largely overlapping. Only the peptides predicted to bind to all HLA alleles included in each superantigen set are selected as potential T-cell epitopes. Thus, indentification of these promiscous peptide binders allows to mininize the total number of predicted epitopes whithout compromising the population coverage required in the design of multi-epitope vaccines.