T CELL EPITOPES USEFUL IN A HEPATITIS C VIRUS VACCINE AND AS DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS AND METHODS FOR IDENTIFYING SAME

摘要

In a first aspect the present invention consists of T cell epitopes in the Hepatitis C virus genome. More specifically there is provided 429 linear peptide epitopes from the Hepatitis C Virus genome. In a second aspect the invention also consists of variants of these sequences. In a third aspect this invention consists of a method to predict these sequences from genome data and to validate the predictions experimentally. Ina fourth aspect the present invention provides compositions including these epitopes for use in a vaccine and to induce a T cell response in a subject, or as a diagnostic tool. Figure 2 shows a plot of the measured versus the predicted binding affinity score for four different prediction methods (1) Rammensee matrix method, (b) Hidden Markov model trained on sequences in the Rammensee dataset, (c) Neural network trained with sparse sequence encoding, and (d) The Comb-II neural network method.