Data from recent epidemiological studies indicate that in 2010, infectious diseases caused 18.5% of all human deaths and 23% of disability-adjusted life years 3, 4.

Vaccination is a proven, safe and cost-effective way to protect against infectious disease 1, 2, but potentially vaccine-preventable illnesses continue to place a heavy burden on the human population.

More generally, the results provide proof of principle for epitope-focused and scaffold-based vaccine design, and encourage the evaluation and further development of these strategies for a variety of other vaccine targets, including antigenically highly variable pathogens such as human immunodeficiency virus and influenza. These scaffolds represent promising leads for the research and development of a human respiratory syncytial virus vaccine needed to protect infants, young children and the elderly. Here we show, with a neutralization epitope from respiratory syncytial virus, that computational protein design can generate small, thermally and conformationally stable protein scaffolds that accurately mimic the viral epitope structure and induce potent neutralizing antibodies. Hence, new vaccine design methods to induce epitope-specific neutralizing antibodies are needed. Several major pathogens have resisted traditional vaccine development, although vulnerable epitopes targeted by neutralizing antibodies have been identified for several such cases. Vaccines prevent infectious disease largely by inducing protective neutralizing antibodies against vulnerable epitopes.

Protein scaffold for bacterial vaccine