Designing vaccines from artificial proteins

© 2020 EPFL - EPFL scientists have developed a new computational approach to create artificial proteins, which showed promising results in vivo as functional vaccines. This approach opens the possibility to engineer safer and more effective vaccines. Vaccines are one of the most effective interventions to prevent the spreading of infectious diseases. They trigger the immune system to produce antibodies that protect us against infection. However, we still lack efficacious vaccines for many important pathogens, like the flu or dengue fever. "When a vaccine doesn't work well, we tend to think that it's because the antibodies produced are not protective," says Bruno Correia, a professor at the Laboratory of Protein Design & Immunoengineering (LPDI) in EPFL's School of Engineering. "It's usually because our immune system is simply making the wrong type of antibodies".