Harnessing Bioinformatics for Designing a Novel Multi-epitope Peptide Vaccine Against Breast Cancer

Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) remains as one of the important causes of cancer deaths among women globally. Therefore, finding an effective treatment for BC is really needed. Cancer immunotherapy, as an emerging field, has a notable role in BC therapy. Peptide vaccines possess an outstanding role among different strategies in cancer immunotherapy. In vaccine design for cancer, induction of cellular and humoral immune responses should be considered. In the current study, cytolytic T lymphocytes (CTL) epitopes were evoked from human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2), mucin 1 protein (MUC1), and heparanase antigenic proteins; and helper T lymphocytes (HTL) epitopes were determined from survivin protein by various immunoinformatics servers. Furthermore, our vaccine peptide contains several linear and conformational B cell epitopes that can induce humoral immunity. In order to elicit broad cellular and humoral immune responses, Por B protein from Neisseria meningitides, which is one of the toll like receptor 2 (TLR2) agonists, was utilized as an adjuvant in the vaccine construct. The designed peptide vaccine contains the extracellular domain of murine ULBP-like transcript 1 (MULT1), which binds to a natural killer group 2 member D (NKG2D) receptor with a high affinity and has a key role in triggering the innate immune response. All the mentioned segments were fused together by functional and structural amino acid linkers. Taken together, we project that our vaccine construct can potentially induce cellular, humoral, and innate immune responses in BC patients.