T cell vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 are being developed at a rapid pace, but it is imperative that the proteins or peptides they deliver bind to a large variety of HLA haplotypes in the global population. Using a computational tool designed to predict candidate neoantigens for cancer vaccines, this preprint identifies 1,103 unique 9-mer antigens from the SARS-CoV-2 peptidome, each of which binds to a median of 3 of 1,022 HLA class I alleles. This resulted in 6,748 peptide–MHC pairs with high binding affinity. Up to 684 peptides were derived from each viral protein tested. Furthermore, 12 of the identified SARS-CoV-2 epitopes match SARS-CoV epitopes that were previously shown to generate T cell responses ex vivo and in vitro. This publicly available dataset will be an important resource to guide vaccine development.
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
References
Original article
- Campbell KM, et al. Prediction of SARS-CoV-2 epitopes across 9360 HLA class I alleles. bioRxiv. 2020 doi: 10.1101/2020.03.30.016931. [DOI] [Google Scholar]