Bioinformatics design of a peptide vaccine containing sarcoma antigen NY-SAR-35 epitopes against breast cancer and evaluation of its immunological function in BALB/c mouse model

Abstract

The development of a cancer vaccine has become an essential focus in the field of medical biotechnology and immunology. In our study, the NY-SAR-35 cancer/testis antigen was targeted to design a novel peptide vaccine using bioinformatics tools, and BALB/c mice were used to evaluate the vaccine’s immunological function. This evaluation involved assessing peptide-specific IgG levels in the serum via ELISA and measuring the levels of IFN-γ, IL-4, and granzyme B in the supernatant of cultured splenocytes. The final vaccine construct consisted of two T lymphocyte epitopes linked by the AAY linker. This construct displayed high antigenicity, non-allergenicity, non-toxicity, stability, and ability to induce IFN-γ and IL-4. It showed stable dynamics with both human MHC-I and II molecules, as well as mouse MHC-II molecules, and revealed strong Van der Waals and electrostatic energies. Emulsifying our peptide vaccine in incomplete Freund’s adjuvant resulted in a remarkable increase in the levels of IgG. The splenocytes of mice that received the combination of peptide and adjuvant displayed a noteworthy increase in IFN-γ, IL-4, and granzyme B secretion. Additionally, their lymphocytes exhibited higher proliferation rates compared to the control group. Our data demonstrated that our vaccine could stimulate a robust immune response, making it a promising candidate for cancer prevention. However, clinical trials are necessary to assess its efficacy in humans. © 2024 Samman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.