Designing Novel Epitope-based Polyvalent Vaccines Against Herpes Simplex Virus-1 and 2 Exploiting the Immunoinformatics Approach

Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) is a highly infectious virus that is responsible for various types of orofacial and genital infections. Two types of HSV exist i.e. HSV-1 and HSV-2, that are infecting millions of people around the world. However, no satisfactory treatment or counter-measure has yet been discovered to fight against the HSV infections. In this study, three possible polyvalent subunit vaccines against multiple strains of HSV-1 and HSV-2, targeting the envelope glycoproteins- E, B, and D, were designed using the tools of reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics. The highly antigenic, non-allergenic, non-toxic, non-homolog (to the human proteome), and 100% conserved epitopes across the selected strains and species (eight epitopes from each of the CTL, HTL, and BCL epitope groups), were selected for vaccine construction. These designed vaccines are expected to be effective against the selected viral types simultaneously (as a polyvalent vaccine), without producing any unwanted adverse reaction within the body. Finally, from the three vaccine constructs, one best vaccine was determined by molecular docking analysis and thereafter, the MD simulation and immune simulation studies of the best vaccine construct also yielded satisfactory results, pointing towards quite good stability of the complex. Finally, cloning was performed for analyzing the effective mass production strategy of the best vaccine construct. However, wet lab-based study should be conducted on the suggested vaccines for validating their potentiality, safety, and efficacy.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.