Back

Defining antigen targets to dissect vaccinia virus (VACV) and Monkeypox virus (MPXV)-specific T cell responses in humans

Grifoni, A.; Zhang, Y.; Tarke, A.; Sidney, J.; Rubiro, P.; Reina-Campos, M.; Filaci, G.; Dan, J. M.; Scheuermann, R. H.; Sette, A.

2022-09-07 immunology
10.1101/2022.09.06.506534 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The current Monkeypox virus (MPXV) outbreak in non-endemic countries is raising concern about the pandemic potential of novel orthopoxviruses. Little is known regarding MPXV immunity in the context of MPXV infection or vaccination with Vaccinia-based vaccines (VACV). As with vaccinia, T cells are likely to provide an important contribution to overall immunity to MPXV. Here we leveraged the epitope information available in Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) on VACV to predict potential MPXV targets recognized by CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses. We found a high degree of conservation between VACV epitopes and MPXV, and defined T cell immunodominant targets. These analyses enabled the design of peptide pools able to experimentally detect VACV-specific T cell responses and MPXV cross-reactive T cells in a cohort of vaccinated individuals. Our findings will facilitate the monitoring of cellular immunity following MPXV infection and vaccination.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.