Proteomics for Development of Food Allergy Vaccines

Food allergy is a hypersensitivity reaction to food products initiated by immunologic mechanisms, which represents one of the major concerns in food safety. New therapies for food allergies including oral and epicutaneous allergen-specific immunotherapy are required, and B cell epitope-based allergy vaccines are a good promise to improve this field. In this chapter, we describe a workflow for the design of food allergy vaccines using proteomic tools. The strategy is defined based on the characterization of B cell epitopes for a particular food allergen. For that, the workflow comprises five consecutive steps: (1) shotgun proteomics analysis of different protein isoforms for a particular food allergen, (2) downloading all protein sequences for the specific allergen included in UniProtKB database, (3) analysis by protein-based bioinformatics of B cell epitopes, (4) synthesizing of the selected B cell peptide epitopes, and (5) performing of immunoassays using sera from healthy and allergic patients. The results from this method provide a rationale repository of B cell epitopes for the design of new specific immunotherapies for a particular food allergen. The strategy was optimized for all the beta-parvalbumins (β-PRVBs), which are considered as the main fish allergens. Using this workflow, a total of 35 peptides were identified as B cell epitopes, among them the top 4 B cell peptide epitopes that may induce protective immune response were selected as potential peptide vaccine candidates for fish allergy.