Immunoinformatics: Bioinformatics Behind Vaccine Development

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COMPFEST

5 min readAug 18, 2021

Vaccines have contributed to global health since they were first discovered in the 18th century to treat smallpox. In its development, vaccines have succeeded in overcoming various infectious diseases that have emerged over time and have become inventions that can improve humans' quality and life expectancy. Therefore, the vaccine is also one of the hopes to reduce the number of cases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, vaccine development is relatively expensive and takes years to be ready for use. Several approaches have been taken to reduce the cost and time of vaccine development. One approach taken to increase efficiency in vaccine development is to utilize technology in biological research using a branch of natural science called bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics as a solution for the surge in Biological Data

The surge in biological data has become one of the issues in the world of biology itself. For example, the data stored on GenBank on nucleic acid sequences contain 8,214,000 entries or on the SWISS-PORT database on protein sequences with 88,166 entries in 2000. These additional entries come from various biological research projects and continue to multiply every 15 months.

This biological data surge ultimately poses many challenges in advanced biological research that can be solved using a computational approach. Computer technologies such as CPUs, digital storage, and the ever-evolving internet enable faster computing, more excellent biological data storage, and more practical access and exchange of biological data. In the end, the need for storage, management, and analysis of biological data gave birth to a new discipline called bioinformatics. In short, bioinformatics can be defined as the application of computational science in understanding and managing data to retrieve biological-related information on a large scale.

The three main objectives of applying computational science in biology consist of data management that allows researchers to access information from databases and submit new entries found, develop tools in the software that can facilitate the data analysis process, and utilize tools to analyze and interpret results to become biological information to support research.

Immunoinformatics as a branch of Bioinformatics

Based on the complexity of immunology, vaccine development methods with conventional approaches such as giving chemicals or heating the virus to be inactivated are not necessarily effective because of the possibility that the genetic material of the virus is still intact. The genetic material of the virus can backfire on the target if it has a weak immune system. To overcome this, further research at the molecular level of the human immune system or what is commonly referred to as molecular immunology needs to be developed.

The study of molecular immunology has also not been spared the problem of large data entry spikes. Computational science is increasingly needed to store, process, and analyze this data. Therefore, a branch of immunoinformatics emerged from a combination of immunology and informatics. Immunoinformatics means applying computational science to obtain information in the study of immune function.

To handle large amounts of data in immunological research, the application of immunoinformatics uses bioinformatics tools such as database creation and management, formation and application of prediction tools, and utilization of biological data both structurally and functionally using approaches related to immunoinformatics. These three applications can better understand human and animal immunity and can deal with some less predictable diseases.

One of the outputs of immunoinformatics that we often encounter is vaccines. In the modern vaccine development process, a combination of two approaches is used, namely Reverse Vaccinology (RV) and Structural Vaccinology (SV). This approach is used after data related to DNA sequences is processed and analyzed using bioinformatics, then proceeds to use immunoinformatics to predict and select the appropriate epitope based on the sequence.

Immunoinformatics approach: Reverse Vaccinology & Structural Vaccinology

Using Conventional Vaccinology (CV) is not suitable for dealing with a pandemic whose handling requires faster time. CV can take up to a dozen years to develop a high-risk vaccine. In the process, CV involves intact pathogenic microorganisms so that there is a risk of causing infection. CV also does not provide good protection to targets with weak immunity. In contrast to vaccine development using the CV approach, which takes up to a dozen years, the combination of RV and SV approaches only takes 1 - 2 years. In addition, the approach using RV and SV only requires protein sequences and does not require intact microorganisms in the development process. RV and SV have better accuracy and can modify the epitope structure to lower risk and be more effective.

Reverse vaccinology (RV) is a more modern approach than CV. RV is an epitope-based approach to help identify B cell and T cell epitopes more precisely. By utilizing bioinformatics analysis tools, the results obtained are faster and more accurate. RV uses machine learning to predict B-cell and T-cell epitopes of specific sequences, thereby enabling predictive analysis of emerging new vaccine candidates through in vitro and in vivo assays.

Not only that, Structural Vaccination (SV) emerged as a more modern approach than RV and further increased the efficiency and effectiveness of vaccine candidate development. SV is an approach in the development of protein-based vaccines. Unlike RV, SV can stabilize epitope structures using advanced 3D structure visualization predictions. The visualization allows researchers to find more detailed information to solve problems that often become obstacles in vaccine development.

The COVID-19 vaccines are examples of vaccines developed using modern methods and approaches like RV and SV to increase their effectiveness and safety. Although the efficacy of existing COVID-19 vaccines has not yet reached a percentage of up to 100%, the vaccine can reduce its impact if infected with the virus. So, don't be afraid or worry about getting vaccinated!

Reference:

Immunoinformatics: Bioinformatics Behind Vaccine Development

Bioinformatics as a solution for the surge in Biological Data

Immunoinformatics as a branch of Bioinformatics

Immunoinformatics approach: Reverse Vaccinology & Structural Vaccinology

Written by Amira Husna