Interested in learning more about innovative technologies in vaccine development?
Dr. Anne De Groot, CEO/CSO of EpiVax, will be giving a FREE webinar lecture entitled “Designing an epitope-driven vaccine for a “stealth virus” – H7N9 case study“, generously hosted by DNAvaccine.com. Her lecture will explore the principles and applications of epitope-driven vaccines, using H7N9 as a case study. Join us on December 6th at 12 noon CST (1 EST). Webinar attendance is limited, so register soon! A video of the webinar will be available on Youtube after the event.
Genome-derived, epitope-driven vaccines are vaccines designed directly from the pathogen genome to contain only the targeted, immunogenic epitopes that will confer protective immunity. Epitopes can be rationally selected to best induce an immune response, cover multiple pathogen strains, cover the human population and prevent adverse responses (watch out Jenny McCarthy). This technology can be applied to innovative vaccine delivery systems such as DNA vaccines and Multiple Antigen Presentation System (MAPS) as well as more conventional subunit vaccines.
Here at EpiVax we have developed iVAX, a web-based suite of informatics tools to design and engineer effective epitope-based vaccines directly from the pathogen genome. We have used these tool to develop 5 prototype vaccines for h.pylori, tularemia, smallpox, 2009 pandemic H1N1 (swine flu) and 2013 pandemic H7N9 (bird flu) as well as predict the efficacy of traditional flu vaccines. For more information on iVAX, click HERE.
Tune in December 6th for…
Title:
DNAvaccine.com Presents: Designing an epitope-driven vaccine for a “stealth virus” – H7N9 case study
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/562216551
Abstract:
We do not have vaccines for many globally relevant pathogens, and sometimes we are faced with the emergence of a new pathogen to which we have to respond quickly. You may have heard about genome-derived vaccines before, or even epitope-driven vaccines. Are you curious how they could help with the design of new, faster, more effective vaccines? Does the variation in vaccine efficacy relate to T cell epitope content, and could these same tools also be useful for evaluating vaccine efficacy post-facto? How are immunoinformatics tools helping design, evaluate, and improve vaccines? This webinar will answer many of those questions.
Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases represent a significant challenge for next-generation vaccine design and bioterror preparedness. EpiVax designs vaccines using a proprietary suite of online immunoinformatics tools for accelerated design of genome-derived, epitope-driven vaccines generated from protein sequences. Using the Conservatrix algorithm, even the most mutable pathogenic genomes may be probed for highly conserved segments, which are then mapped for T cell epitopes and regions of high epitope density using EpiMatrix and ClustiMer. Pathogen sequences which could potentially elicit an undesired autoimmune or T-regulatory response due to homology with sequences encoded by the human genome are screened out using BlastiMer and JanusMatrix, an improved homology analysis tool examining pathogen/host sequence similarity with respect to the HLA and TCR faces of an epitope. Immunogenic Consensus Sequences are created by EpiAssembler, a tool which optimizes the balance between pathogen and population coverage. VaccineCAD links potential vaccine candidate epitopes into a string-of-beads design while minimizing non-specific junctional epitopes that may be created in the linking process. With proof of principle established in animal models for vaccines against Tularemia, Vaccinia and H. pylori, the iVAX toolkit exemplifies a rapid, efficient, easily accessible and broadly applicable solution to accelerate the development of critically important vaccines for human health and biodefense.
In this talk, Dr. De Groot will explore an recent biological threat, H7N9, as a case study for assessing and producing a vaccine ‘on demand’.
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