Strategies for computational vaccine design: from prefusion stabilisation to epitope focussing

Computational and structure-based vaccine design is examined through two approaches. One uses stabilising mutations to preserve a vaccine antigen in its prefusion conformation; the other extracts epitope information and scaffolds it onto non-antigen protein backbones. The presentation compares the strengths, limitations and potential vaccine-development applications of these strategies. Familiarity with vaccine antigens and viral glycoproteins is helpful, while computational protein-design experience is unnecessary.