Custommune

Custommune generates personalized and population-targeted peptide vaccine candidates by predicting immunogenic epitopes from patient-specific viral sequences and Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) alleles to support therapeutic and preventive vaccine development against HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.

Key Features:

• Personalized Vaccine Design: Predicts personalized epitopes for HIV-1 using patient-specific Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) alleles and viral sequences.
• Population-Targeted Vaccines: Identifies peptides for specific populations and predicts epitopes likely to induce CD8+ T-cell immunity and neutralizing antibodies against conserved regions of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).
• Efficiency and Scalability: Automates peptide design to reduce manual errors and increase reproducibility and scalability of vaccine candidate generation.
• Predictive Accuracy: Validates predicted peptides against manually designed peptides used in clinical trials such as NCT02961829.
• Therapeutic and Preventive Applications: Supports design of therapeutic vaccines aimed at eliminating infected cells (relevant to HIV-1 cure strategies) and identification of structurally conserved epitopes for preventive vaccines.

Scientific Applications:

• Personalized HIV-1 Therapeutics: Generates patient-specific epitope candidates for therapeutic vaccination aimed at eliminating HIV-1–infected cells.
• Population-Level SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines: Identifies conserved SARS-CoV-2 peptides to elicit CD8+ T-cell responses and neutralizing antibodies for COVID-19 population-targeted vaccines.
• Epitope Resilience Assessment: Prioritizes epitopes predicted to be resilient to immune escape by assessing potential immune escape mutations and HLA binding.

Methodology:

Predicts HLA-peptide binding strength and potential immune escape mutations from patient-specific viral sequences and HLA alleles using computational algorithms.