An Immunoinformatic Strategy to Develop New Mycobacterium tuberculosis Multi-epitope Vaccine.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes a life-threatening disease known as tuberculosis (TB). In 2021, tuberculosis was the second cause of death after COVID-19 among infectious diseases. Latent life cycle and development of multidrug resistance in one hand and lack of an effective vaccine in another hand have made TB a global health issue. Here, a multi-epitope vaccine have been designed against TB using five new antigenic protein and immunoinformatic tools. To do so, immunodominant MHC-I/MHC-II binding epitopes of Rv2346, Rv2347, Rv3614, Rv3615 and Rv2031 antigenic proteins have been selected using advanced computational procedures. The vaccine was designed by linking ten epitopes from the antigenic proteins and flagellin and TpD as adjuvant. Three-dimensional (3D) structure of the vaccine was modeled, was refined and was evaluated using bioinformatics tools. The 3D structure of the vaccine was docked into the toll-like-receptors (TLR3, 4, 8) to evaluate potential interaction between the vaccine and TLRs. Evaluation of immunological and physicochemical properties of the constructed vaccine have demonstrated the vaccine construct can induce significant humoral and cellular immune responses, the vaccine is non-allergenic and can be recognized by TLR proteins. The immunoinformatic results reported in the present study demonstrates that it is worth following the designed vaccine by experimental investigations.