Back

Improving influenza A vaccine strain selection through deep evolutionary models

Shi, W.; Wohlwend, J.; Wu, M.; Barzilay, R.

2023-11-16 immunology
10.1101/2023.11.14.567037 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Current vaccines provide limited protection against rapidly evolving viruses. For example, the flu vaccines effectiveness has averaged below 40% for the past five years. Today, clinical outcomes of vaccine effectiveness can only be assessed retrospectively. Since vaccine strains are selected at least six months ahead of flu season, prospective estimation of their effectiveness is crucial but remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose an in-silico method named VaxSeer that selects vaccine strains based on their coverage scores, which quantifies expected vaccine effectiveness in future seasons. This score considers both the future dominance of circulating viruses and antigenic profiles of vaccine candidates. Based on historical WHO data, our approach consistently selects superior strains than the annual recommendations. Finally, the prospective coverage score exhibits a strong correlation with retrospective vaccine effectiveness and reduced disease burden, highlighting the promise of this framework in driving the vaccine selection process.

Matching journals

The top 5 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.