PBIT V3 : A robust and comprehensive tool for screening pathogenic proteomes for drug targets and prioritizing vaccine candidates.

Rise of life-threatening superbugs, pandemics and epidemics warrants the need for cost-effective and novel pharmacological interventions. Availability of publicly available proteomes of pathogens supports development of high-throughput discovery platforms to prioritize potential drug-targets and develop testable hypothesis for pharmacological screening. The pipeline builder for identification of target (PBIT) was developed in 2016 and updated in 2021, with the purpose of accelerating the search for drug-targets by integration of methods like comparative and subtractive genomics, essentiality/virulence and druggability analysis. Since then, it has been used for identification of drugs and vaccine targets, safety profiling of multiepitope vaccines and mRNA vaccine construction against a broad-spectrum of pathogens. This tool has now been updated with functionalities related to systems biology and immuno-informatics and validated by analyzing 48 putative antigens of Mycobacterium tuberculosis documented in literature. PBIT v3 available as both online and offline tools will enhance drug discovery against emerging drug-resistant infectious agents. PBIT v3 can be freely accessed at http://pbit.bicnirrh.res.in/.