Advancing ASFV Vaccine Development: A Multi-epitope Vaccine Design via <i>in silico</i> Techniques

The African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV), commonly known as African swine fever, is the causative agent of hemorrhagic fever. The acute stage of ASFV infection results in 100% mortality of infected pigs. Despite numerous efforts to develop effective vaccines, only a recently commercialized live attenuated vaccine has shown promising protection against ASFV in animals. However, considering the challenges associated with the robust production of inactivated vaccines on a commercial scale, a plausible solution to control ASFV outbreaks lies in biosecurity measures or the eradication of infected animals. Given the current scenario, we applied in silico approaches to identify better and conserved epitopes in ASFV antigenic proteins (p72, CD2v) to construct a universal ASFV Multi-epitope Vaccine (MEV) candidate. Subsequently, the designed vaccine and its interactions with porcine immune receptors were evaluated using a stringent bioinformatics tool-based pipeline. The results revealed that B-cell and T lymphocyte epitopes predicted from the consensus sequences of viral proteins and appended to the chimeric vaccine were antigenic and nonallergenic. The incorporation of Porcine Beta Defensin-2 (69-mer) into the vaccine design as an adjuvant enhanced the immunogenicity of the vaccine candidate. Finally, using computational tools, the tertiary structure of the predicted chimeric vaccine was refined for downstream analysis. Molecular docking, molecular dynamics and immune simulations have depicted the binding of vaccines with porcine innate immune receptors to generate effective immune responses. Overall, our findings reveal that a computationally designed vaccine is a suitable candidate for controlling the global burden of ASFV.