Designing B-Cell Epitopes for Immunotherapy and Subunit Vaccines.
Rationally designed subunit vaccines mainly consist of small peptides or B-cell epitopes, which can stimulate the body's immune response. Development of subunit vaccines is a very tedious and costly process. One of the imperative and crucial steps of vaccine development is the identification of highly competent B-cell epitopes as most of the proteins and fragments of proteins are immunologically irrelevant. With the advances in bioinformatics tools, it can be possible to precisely narrow down potential B-cell epitopes from the whole proteome of any pathogen. This chapter sheds light on prediction and designing of B-cell epitopes using two in silico tools LBtope and IgPred.