Apropos of Universal Epitope Discovery for COVID-19 Vaccines: A Framework for Targeted Phage Display-Based Delivery and Integration of New Evaluation Tools

Christopher Markosian; Daniela I Staquicini; Prashant Dogra; Esteban Dodero-Rojas; Fenny H F Tang; Tracey L Smith; Vinícius G Contessoto; Steven K Libutti; Zhihui Wang; Vittorio Cristini; Paul C Whitford; Stephen K Burley; José N Onuchic; Renata Pasqualini; Wadih Arap

doi:10.1101/2021.08.30.458222

Apropos of Universal Epitope Discovery for COVID-19 Vaccines: A Framework for Targeted Phage Display-Based Delivery and Integration of New Evaluation Tools

bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2021 Aug 30:2021.08.30.458222. doi: 10.1101/2021.08.30.458222.

Authors

Christopher Markosian^{1

2}, Daniela I Staquicini^{1

2}, Prashant Dogra^{3

4}, Esteban Dodero-Rojas⁵, Fenny H F Tang^{1

2}, Tracey L Smith^{1

2}, Vinícius G Contessoto^{5

6}, Steven K Libutti^{7

8}, Zhihui Wang^{3

4}, Vittorio Cristini^{3

9

10}, Paul C Whitford¹¹, Stephen K Burley^{7

12

13

14}, José N Onuchic^{5

15

16

17}, Renata Pasqualini^{1

2

18}, Wadih Arap^{1

19

18}

Affiliations

¹ Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Newark, NJ 07101.
² Division of Cancer Biology, Department of Radiation Oncology, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ 07103.
³ Mathematics in Medicine Program, Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston, TX 77030.
⁴ Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10022.
⁵ Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.
⁶ Department of Physics, Institute of Biosciences, Humanities and Exact Sciences, São Paulo State University, São José do Rio Preto, SP 15054, Brazil.
⁷ Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
⁸ Department of Surgery, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
⁹ Department of Imaging Physics, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030.
¹⁰ Physiology, Biophysics, and Systems Biology Program, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY 10022.
¹¹ Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.
¹² Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ 08854.
¹³ RCSB Protein Data Bank and Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ 08854.
¹⁴ RCSB Protein Data Bank, San Diego Supercomputer Center and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92067.
¹⁵ Department of Biosciences, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.
¹⁶ Department of Chemistry, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.
¹⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.
¹⁸ These authors jointly supervised this work.
¹⁹ Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ 07103.

Abstract

Targeted bacteriophage (phage) particles are potentially attractive yet inexpensive platforms for immunization. Herein, we describe targeted phage capsid display of an immunogenically relevant epitope of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein that is empirically conserved, likely due to the high mutational cost among all variants identified to date. This observation may herald an approach to developing vaccine candidates for broad-spectrum, towards universal, protection against multiple emergent variants of coronavirus that cause COVID-19.

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