A Comparative Analysis of Computational Strategies in Multi-Epitope Vaccine Design Against Human Papillomavirus and Cervical Cancer.

ABSTRACT

Given the critical role of human papillomavirus (HPV) in the cause of cervical cancer and other malignancies, there is a need for innovative approaches to preventing this infection. It has been shown that immunoinformatics is an important strategy in computational vaccinology. It is used to design new multi-epitope vaccines against different types of HPV and subsequent cervical cancer. This paper reviews the scope of the entire computational pipeline of HPV vaccine design, starting from data analysis at the genomic and proteomic levels and continuing to epitope predictions of the innate and adaptive immune systems. The search strategy was based on investigating original articles published in "Google Scholar" and "PubMed" from 2015 to 2023-2024. The terms "Immunoinformatics", "Bioinformatics", "Human papillomavirus (HPV)", "Vaccine design", "In silico vaccine design", "Multi-epitope vaccine design", "Vaccinology" and "HPV vaccine" were used to for this purpose. We discussed various essential tools involved in the computational design of the vaccine process, e.g., sequence analysis, epitope prediction, conservancy analysis, tertiary structure modeling, refinement, molecular docking, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, and in silico cloning. This review article describes immunoinformatics methods that facilitate the design of a multi-epitope vaccine against HPV. However, this pipeline can also be used to design novel chimeric vaccines for other pathogens.