Immunogenicity may be a major obstacle to the success of protein drug therapy. As more protein-based drugs are developed, minimizing the immunogenicity of these drugs becomes an important application of T cell epitope prediction. With the support of our advanced protein engineering platform established for many years, Creative BioMart is committed to developing a variety of high-quality computational techniques and software programs for T cell epitope prediction. Our scientists provide you with a comprehensive customized T cell epitope prediction service to reduce the immunogenicity of protein drugs by removing T cell epitopes from protein therapeutics.

An epitope is the part of an immunogenic protein that is recognized by the immune system. After a specific antigen is processed intracellularly, a peptide that can be recognized by T-cell receptors binds to at least one MHC molecule and is expressed on the surface of antigen-presenting cells in the form of MHC-peptide complexes, called T-cell epitopes. T-cell epitope prediction has been a challenge due to the high polymorphism of MHC and the variability in the amount of data at various steps encountered during T-cell epitope generation and presentation in living systems. Identifying these epitopes is important for tracking, phenotyping, and stimulating T cells involved in immune responses in infectious diseases, allergy, autoimmunity, transplantation, and cancer. Scientists have used various methods to predict T cell epitopes, such as considering the amphiphilic properties of proteins, motif-based methods, quantitative matrix-based methods, artificial neural network-based methods, support vector machines, QSAR, and docking simulations. The T-cell epitope content of proteins can now be measured with relative accuracy, and the regional and overall immune potential of protein treatments can also be assessed.

Fig 1. T-cell epitope recognition. (Sanchez-Trincado JL, et al., 2017)

Services

Regulatory T cell epitopes during drug development may alter the innate regulatory immune response to recombinant autologous proteins, leading to better reductions in immunogenicity. Creative BioMart has successfully developed multiple T cell epitope prediction and analysis tools to identify novel T cell epitope targets to facilitate vaccine design, providing the most comprehensive solution for the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins. Our service is widely welcomed by immune system and therapeutic protein researchers developing immune-based vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Our goal is to enable workflows for predicting which epitopes are best for different applications and automating neo-epitope identification. We offer the following services for T cell epitopes:

• T cell epitope-MHC binding prediction: predicting IC50 values of peptides that bind to specific MHC molecules, determine the binding ability of peptides to bind to MHC class Ⅰmolecules and MHC class Ⅱ molecules.
• T cell epitope-processing prediction: predicting candidate epitopes based on the processing of peptides in cells.
• T cell epitopes-immunogenicity prediction: predicting the relative ability of peptide/MHC complexes to elicit an immune response.

Methods of T cell Epitope Prediction and Analysis

The methods of T cell epitope prediction we adopted can be roughly divided into two categories:

• Direct prediction methods: based on sequence and structural analysis of T cell epitopes, such as amphipathicity based method and motif based method, etc.
• Indirect prediction methods: using some elegant techniques based on statistical learning theory, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), etc.

The methods of T cell epitope analysis we adopted can be roughly divided into three categories:

• Homology mapping: mapping epitopes onto the 3D protein structure of its source antigen or its homologues.
• Epitope cluster analysis: grouping epitopes based on their sequence similarity.
• Epitope conservation analysis: calculating the degree of conservation of epitopes in a provided set of proteins.

Service Principle

Creative BioMart is based on innovative, pragmatic and honest, adhering to the tenet of "Quality is our life, providing customers with the best quality service", providing customized services to customers around the world.

We will be glad to discuss details of intended interaction studies with you and develop experimental strategies/methods tailored to your requirement. Our customer service representatives are enthusiastic and trustworthy 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday. If you are interested in our services, please do not hesitate to contact us for more information or to discuss in detail.

References

1. Schaap-Johansen AL, Vujović M, et al.. (2021) T Cell Epitope Prediction and Its Application to Immunotherapy. Front Immunol. 12: 712488.
2. Sanchez-Trincado JL, Gomez-Perosanz M, Reche PA. (2017) Fundamentals and Methods for T- and B-Cell Epitope Prediction. J Immunol Res. 2017:2680160.

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