Interleukin-13 peptide vaccine induces protective humoral immunity in murine asthma models

This study presents a rational design approach to discovery synthetic peptide vaccine candidates from endogenous proteins for chronic non-infectious diseases immunological therapeutics. The approach described the screening of key antigenic amino acid residues of the interleukine-13, which is up-regulated expression in asthma, followed by the development of immunological helper epitope peptides via an integrative computational and experimental method. Notably, this totally synthetic peptide vaccine was capable of stimulating humoral immune responses much stronger than those of parental antigenic peptides by enhancing the efficiency of antigen presentation, and had effective treatment in mouse asthma models. Our approach offers new possibilities to discovery therapeutic peptide vaccine candidates for chronic non-infectious diseases, with highly consolidated in silico and animal disease models for fast iterative screening.