VaccineDesigner: A Web-based Tool for Streamlined Multi-epitope Vaccine Design

Abstract Background Multi-epitope vaccines have become the preferred strategy for protection against infectious diseases by integrating multiple MHC-restricted T-cell and B-cell epitopes that elicit both humoral and cellular immune responses against pathogens. Computational methods address various aspects independently, yet their orchestration is technically challenging as most bioinformatics tools are accessible through heterogeneous interfaces and lack interoperability features. The present work proposes a novel framework for rationalized multi-epitope vaccine design that streamlines end-to-end analyses through an integrated Web-based environment. Results VaccineDesigner is a comprehensive Web-based framework that streamlines the design of protective epitope-based vaccines by seamlessly integrating computational methods for B-cell, CTL, and HTL epitope prediction. VaccineDesigner incorporates single epitope prediction and evaluation as well as additional analyses, such as multi-epitope vaccine generation, estimation of population coverage, molecular mimicry, and proteasome cleavage. The functionalities are transparently integrated into a modular architecture, providing a single access point for rationalized, multi-epitope vaccine generation, time and cost-effectively. Conclusions VaccineDesigner is a Web-based interface for developing multi-epitope vaccines. Given a protein sequence, VaccineDesigner identifies and evaluates candidate B-cell, CTL, and HTL epitopes and constructs a library of multi-epitope vaccines that combine strong immunogenic responses, safety, and broad population coverage. The source code is available under the academic license at: https://github.com/BiolApps/VaccineDesigner . VaccineDesigner is freely accessible at: http://bioinformatics.med.auth.gr/VaccineDesigner .