ABSTRACT
Vaccination is one of the most important strategies for the development of active immunity against infectious diseases. In modern medicine, vaccines are also a part of immunotherapy for deadly diseases such as cancer. Vaccines are typically prepared with mixtures of inactivated or attenuated causative agents. Subcellular, subunit, DNA, and RNA vaccines are important parts of modern medicine developed over the last 10–20 years. The tremendous progress in the field of computational biology has enabled major advancements in the discovery and design of potent immunogenic recombinant protein vaccine antigens. In this chapter, we discuss three major approaches for in silico vaccine engineering: first, identification of the potential vaccine antigens with genomic and computational biology; second, their rational optimization for computational epitope prediction; and third, the use of the latest structural and immunological databases for the development of recombinant protein vaccines with improved immunogenicity and efficacy.
