A NOVEL TETRAVALENT RECOMBINANT ENVELOPE DOMAIN III VACCINE AGAINST DENGUE: AN IN SILICO APPROACH

The global rise in dengue cases is a major public health concern in terms of morbidity and mortality. The recent study reports 390 million dengue infections annually of which 96 million infections becomes clinically or subclinically severe. Therefore, development of an effective tetravalent vaccine against dengue is a top priority. Dengue envelope domain III is a surface exposed protein; involved in host cell binding and containing multiple, serotype-specific and subcomplex-specific neutralizing epitopes, thus becomes an ideal target for vaccine development. The rapid growth in bioinformatics or immunoinformatics area in terms of development of sophisticated tools assists researchers to predict immunodominant epitopes and study various characteristics of the predicted vaccine model. The combination of computer-aided or in silico methods and experimental methods are useful tools to address complex problems such as deciphering immune responses and vaccine design. In the present study we aim to develop a recombinant tetravalent vaccine model using bioinformatics tools of our vaccine candidate containing envelope domain III of all four dengue serotypes (GenBank ID: KF 855114) and study its role and characteristics with its sequence and structure based features. In silico approach showed that our vaccine is stable, properly folded, antigenic and having multiple predicted B and T cell epitopes that are known to be immunogenic. Also the docking studies using a mouse monoclonal antibody (4E11), which neutralizes all four DENV serotypes, predicted a favourable and stable protein-protein interaction model. Further studies are underway to test its immunogenicity and efficacy in mice