Designing Novel Subunit Vaccines against Herpes Simplex Virus-1 using Reverse Vaccinology Approach

Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) is an infectious virus that is responsible for various types of orofacial and genital infections. Two types of HSV viruses, HSV-1 and HSV-2, are the most dangerous HSV viruses. Every year, millions of people get infected with this menacing virus, however, no satisfactory treatment or vaccine has not yet been discovered to fight against HSV. Although there are some anti-viral therapies, however, studies have showed that such anti-viral therapies may also fail to provide good impact. In this study, a possible subunit vaccine against HSV-1, strain-17, was designed using the tools and reverse vaccinology and bioinformatics. Three potential antigenic envelope glycoproteins were selected from nine envelope glycoproteins, for possible vaccine construction. Potential epitopes capable of inducing high immunogenic response and at the same time have non-allergenicity and conservancy across other strains and species, were selected by some robust analysis, for vaccine construction. Finally, three possible vaccines were designed. Each of the vaccine construct differ from each other only in their adjuvant sequences and based on molecular docking analysis, one best vaccine construct was selected for molecular dynamics simulation study and in silico codon adaptation. The experiment showed that the selected best vaccine should be good candidate against HPV-1, strain-17. However, wet lab study should be conducted on the suggested vaccine(s) for confirming their potentiality, safety and efficacy.