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What is polyepitope vaccine

A polyepitope is a multiple immunogenic approach to identify the epitope of the smallest immunogenic subunit derived from an antigenic protein for epitope-based vaccine development. Epitope-based approaches are capable of inducing protective immunity against a large and complex pathogen. Developing multiepitopes-based vaccines which contains diverse antigenic type prevent the danger of administering whole proteins or genes that have unknown and possibly dangerous properties. The approach of using a polyepitope vaccine has been used to induce immunity against multiple antigenic targets, multiple strain variants, and/or even multiple pathogens. DNA-based polyepitope vaccines have been shown to induce a multiple response by generating different self-reactive T cell repertoires. The experiment from J.A. Wolff demonstrated that the in vivo injection of RNA and DNA mammalian expression vectors containing foreign genes into mouse skeletal muscle was able to induce foreign protein expression in muscle cells opened up the discovery of a novel type of immunization1. The polyepitope DNA-based cancer vaccine approach can (a) circumvent the variability of peptide presentation by tumor cells, (b) allow the introduction in the plasmid construct of multiple immunogenic epitopes including heteroclitic epitope versions, and (c) permit to enroll patients with different major histocompatibility complex (MHC) haplotypes2.

Reference:

  1.  J. A. Wolff, M. E. Dowty, and M. E. Dowty, “Expression of naked plasmids by cultured myotubes and entry of plasmids into T tubules and caveolae of mammalian skeletal muscle,” Journal of Cell Science, vol. 103, no. 4, pp. 1249–1259, 1992
  2. R. Bei, A. Scardino, “TAA Polyepitope DNA-Based Vaccines: A Potential Tool for Cancer Therapy,” Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, Vol. 2010, pp 12, 2010