Peptide Libraries for Vaccine Development

Overview

Vaccines are most commonly composed of attenuated or inactivated disease-causing pathogens. While they are generally effective, they can cause complications in immunocompromised patients and have a shorter shelf-life. Since most T lymphocytes recognize specific amino acid sequences on an antigen, synthetic peptide vaccines represent a cost effective alternative to traditional vaccines; however, for them to be effective, these immunogenic sequences need to be identified.

Peptide libraries simplify epitope screening for vaccine design

In the quest to find immunogenic epitopes on proteins, there are two main bottlenecks: (1) the three-dimensional structure of proteins may "hide" the most immunogenic sequences and (2) there might be multiple antigenic epitopes on a target protein. Peptide libraries can address both of these bottlenecks by spanning multiple combinations of peptides in parallel. In addition, peptide pooling can also facilitate epitope discovery for vaccines. For the latter, multiple immunostimulatory epitopes are combined to determine which combinations best stimulate lymphocytes.