Protein Research Center at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
Founder of the biotech startup, TardigradeNano, and formerly a Professor at University of Illinois in Chicago, Chapman University, and University of California in Irvine.
Brief Bioinform. 2021 Nov 5;22(6). doi: 10.1093/bib/bbab241.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of data on genomic and proteomic sequences of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) stored in various databases has exponentially grown. A large volume of these data has led to the production of equally immense sets of immunological data, which require rigorous computational approaches to sort through and make sense of. Immunoinformatics has emerged in the recent decades as a field capable of offering this approach by bridging experimental and theoretical immunology with state-of-the-art computational tools. Here, we discuss how immunoinformatics can assist in the development of high-performance vaccines and drug discovery needed to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Immunoinformatics can provide a set of computational tools to extract meaningful connections from the large sets of COVID-19 patient data, which can be implemented in the design of effective vaccines. With this in mind, we represent a pipeline to identify the role of immunoinformatics in COVID-19 treatment and vaccine development. In this process, a number of free databases of protein sequences, structures and mutations are introduced, along with docking web servers for assessing the interaction between antibodies and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein segments as most commonly considered antigens in vaccine design.
随着 COVID-19 大流行的爆发，严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 的基因组和蛋白质组序列在各种数据库中的数据量呈指数级增长。大量的数据产生了同样巨大的免疫数据，这些数据需要严格的计算方法来梳理和理解。免疫信息学在最近几十年中出现，作为一个能够通过将实验和理论免疫学与最先进的计算工具相结合来提供这种方法的领域。在这里，我们讨论了免疫信息学如何帮助开发高性能疫苗和药物发现，以遏制 SARS-CoV-2 的传播。免疫信息学可以提供一组计算工具，从大量的 COVID-19 患者数据中提取有意义的联系，这些联系可以在有效疫苗的设计中得到实现。考虑到这一点，我们提出了一个识别免疫信息学在 COVID-19 治疗和疫苗开发中的作用的管道。在这个过程中，引入了许多免费的蛋白质序列、结构和突变数据库，以及对接网络服务器，用于评估抗体与 SARS-CoV-2 刺突蛋白片段之间的相互作用，因为这些片段通常被认为是疫苗设计中的抗原。
