Mapping new directions in vaccine development.
Non-Classically activated T-Cells and their application to peptide-based vaccine development.
IPC Bioinformatics has identified a potent class of homologous peptide antigen pairs (HPAPs) for use in peptide-based vaccine development. These HPAPs have the unique ability to prime Dendritic Cells (DCs) into producing highly specialized non-classically activated T-Cells. IPC’s Bioinformatic tools identify these HPAPs from the pathogen’s protein sequences involved in Host invasion (and evasion) ranking them according to how strongly they will elicit this highly specialized immune response. Once categorized, the HPAPs with the strongest activating responses can be tested for potency using naïve donor blood samples to measure the T-Cell responses in vitro.
HPAPs that produce strong non-classical T-Cell responses are critical for effective peptide vaccine formulations because they will only activate these unique T-Cells and not those that produce unwanted tolerogenic or weak memory responses. These HPAPs are expected to not only revolutionize the thinking around how to prepare peptide-based vaccines, but to revolutionize the theory around how the immune system can be primed to produce a newly described set of T-Cells critical for pathogen (virus) control.