Immunoinformatics, molecular modeling, and cancer vaccines

Cancer vaccines are a natural way of fighting the development and progression of cancer as they harness the power of immune system to tweak it into killing cancerous cells. One of the most important agents in an immune system, the cytotoxic T cells (CTL), play a major role and the CTL epitopes in the form of an immunotherapeutic product have been shown to help mount an immune response towards tumor cell destruction. Immunoinformatics and molecular modeling tools have proven powerful towards the prediction of plausible CTL epitopes as well as other epitopes, cutting short the time and cost. We focus on the sequential methodology using these tools as well as some databases to generate a succinct list of enterprising subtype-specific or promiscuous peptide epitopes.