Preliminary Identification of Potential Vaccine Targets for the COVID-19 Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) Based on SARS-CoV Immunological Studies

By Syed Faraz Ahmed, Ahmed Abdul Quadeer, Matthew R. McKay. bioRxiv, 2020

1,123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of COVID-19 outbreak caused by a novel coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). There is an imminent need to better understand this new virus and to develop ways to control its spread. In this study, we sought to gain insights for vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2 by considering the high genetic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, which caused the outbreak in 2003, and leveraging existing immunological studies of SARS-CoV. By screening the experimentally-determined SARS-CoV-derived B cell and T cell epitopes in the immunogenic structural proteins of SARS-CoV, we identified a set of B cell and T cell epitopes derived from the spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins that map identically to SARS-CoV-2 proteins. As no mutation has been observed in these identified epitopes among the available SARS-CoV-2 sequences (as of 9 February 2020), immune targeting of these epitopes may potentially offer protection against this novel virus. For the T cell epitopes, we performed a population coverage analysis of the associated MHC alleles and proposed a set of epitopes that is estimated to provide broad coverage globally, as well as in China. Our findings provide a screened set of epitopes that can help guide experimental efforts towards the development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

Subfields: Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80eac71aab767692c55eff374e8e45e6b43252e0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Immunology

1. N. Bhardwaj
2. Miriam Merad
3. M. A. Curotto de Lafaille
4. Robert Samstein
5. Kwinten Sliepen
6. A. McMichael

In Infectious Diseases

1. Kwinten Sliepen
2. Abdo A. Elfiky

In Molecular Biology

1. Peter Simmonds
2. A. Ward
3. Kwinten Sliepen
4. A. McMichael

Citations in the corpus

• Broad and strong memory CD4+ and CD8+ T cells induced by SARS-CoV-2 in UK convalescent individuals following COVID-19 (2020, methodology): “A total of 27 previously defined SARS epitopes[20] were also synthesized (Supplementary Table 2).”
• Immunology of COVID-19: Current State of the Science (2020, positive): “…providing data regarding antigen presentation and antibody-binding properties and one study looking into the predicted evolution of epitopes (Ahmed et al., 2020; Baruah and Bose, 2020; Bhattacharya et al., 2020; Fast et al., 2020; Grifoni et al., 2020; Lon et al., 2020; Zheng and Song,…”
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data for Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: A Survey on the State-of-the-Arts (2020, methodology): “The work in [119] used the GISAID database (www.gisaid.org/CoV2020/) that has been used to extract the amino acid residues.”
• Potent neutralizing antibodies from COVID-19 patients define multiple targets of vulnerability (2020, background): “In addition, considering the high sequence homology between the S2 subdomain of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, using the complete S protein ectodomain instead of only the RBD may allow the isolation of mAbs that cross-neutralize different βcoronaviruses (30).”