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 aneed for innovative approaches to preventing this infection. It has been shown that immunoinformatics is an importantstrategy in computational vaccinology. It is used to design new multi-epitope vaccines against different types of HPVand subsequent cervical cancer. This paper reviews the scope of the entire computational pipeline of HPV vaccinedesign, starting from data analysis at the genomic and proteomic levels and continuing to epitope predictions of theinnate 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", "Humanpapillomavirus (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 computationaldesign of the vaccine process, e.g., sequence analysis, epitope prediction, conservancy analysis, tertiary structuremodeling, refinement, molecular docking, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, and in silico cloning. This reviewarticle 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.

Keywords

• human papillomavirus
• hpv
• immunoinformatics
• vaccinology