Multiepitope Vaccines against Neglected, Emerging, and Re-emerging Global Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

Neglected Global Diseases are infectious diseases and other conditions that cause physical and cognitive impairments, including maternal, infant and child health conditions; neglected tropical diseases; as well as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. As climate change pushes the natural selection of pathogens and their vectors and natural reservoirs, the risk of these neglected diseases emerging within a larger global population poses an even greater threat. Vaccination is still viewed as the most effective method of preventing these infectious diseases by inducing protective immunity. Reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics approaches have improved vaccine development and enabled the rapid identification of putative vaccine antigens by screening genomes and/or proteomes; in turn, they have led to the generation of multiepitope vaccines with superior effectiveness. This vaccine platform comprises short immunogenic determinants rather than an entire protein to elicit cellular and humoral immune responses, inducing long-term protection. Such a platform is extremely advantageous due to its safety, rapid production (unlike the traditional vaccines), and low cost; moreover, it has already been utilized in numerous vaccine design studies, generating promising results for several target pathogens, such as dengue virus, Trypanosoma cruzi, Ebola virus, Schistosoma, and SARS cov-2 virus, among several others. 

This Special Issue invites articles and reviews involving multiepitope vaccine design against neglected, emerging, and re-emerging global diseases, as well as methodologies, novel evaluation, and prediction tools for vaccine design improvement. This issue also welcomes works involving the recombinant production and in vitro and/or in vivo validation of these chimeric vaccines.

Dr. Cerrone Cabanos
Guest Editor

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