A Multi-Epitope Vaccine Against Sars-Cov-2 Directed Towards the Latin American Population: An Immunoinformatics Approach

Abstract The coronavirus pandemic is a major public health crisis affecting global health systems with dire socioeconomic consequences, especially in vulnerable regions such as Latin America. There is an urgent need for a vaccine to help control contagion, reduce mortality and alleviate social costs. In this study, we propose a rational multi-epitope vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. Using bioinformatics, we constructed a library of potential vaccine peptides to predict immunological complexes among antigenic, non-toxic and non-allergenic peptides extracted from the conserved regions of 92 proteomes. We included the most common HLA-I and II molecules in the Latin American population. We also used three-dimensional structures of SARS-CoV-2 proteins to identify potential regions for antibody production. The best HLA-I and II predictions (with increased coverage in common alleles and regions evoking B lymphocyte responses) were grouped into an optimised final construct that meets the necessary safety and physicochemical requirements for conducting experimental tests.