Rational Design of a Pan-Coronavirus Vaccine Based on Conserved CTL Epitopes

With the rapid global spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, a safe and effective vaccine against human coronaviruses (HCoVs) is believed to be a top priority in the field of public health. Due to the frequent outbreaks of different HCoVs, the development of a pan-HCoVs vaccine is of great value to biomedical science. The antigen design is a key prerequisite for vaccine efficacy, and we therefore developed a novel antigen with broad coverage based on the genetic algorithm of mosaic strategy. The designed antigen has a potentially broad coverage of conserved cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes to the greatest extent, including the existing epitopes from all reported HCoV sequences (HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-HKU1, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2). This novel antigen is expected to induce strong CTL responses with broad coverage by targeting conserved epitopes against multiple coronaviruses.