Designing a multi-epitope candidate vaccine by employing immunoinformatics approaches to control African swine fever spread

This study uses immunoinformatics (computer-guided vaccine design) to build a candidate vaccine against African swine fever virus, an often fatal infection of farmed and wild pigs for which no vaccine or treatment is approved. The team identified 37 epitopes across several viral proteins, joined them with linkers and adjuvants, modelled the construct’s three-dimensional structure with a deep-learning method, and ran molecular docking and molecular dynamics that predicted stable binding to the pig immune receptor TLR5. The authors present this as a way to speed up early vaccine development and reduce its cost.