Testing a vaccine candidate against Hepatitis C virus designed by combinatorial optimization.

This paper presents a new procedure for vaccine design against highly variable viruses such as Hepatitis C. The procedure uses an optimization algorithm to design vaccines that maximize the coverage of epitopes across different virus variants. Weighted epitopes based on the success ratio of immunological assays are used to prioritize the selection of epitopes for vaccine design.

Computational and Experimental Evaluation of the Immune Response of Neoantigens for Personalized Vaccine Design.

In the last few years, the importance of neoantigens in the development of personalized antitumor vaccines has increased remarkably. In order to study whether bioinformatic tools are effective in detecting neoantigens that generate an immune response, DNA samples from patients with cutaneous melanoma in different stages were obtained, resulting in a total of 6048 potential neoantigens gathered. Thereafter, the immunological responses generated by some of those neoantigens ex vivo were tested, using a vaccine designed by a new optimization approach and encapsulated in nanoparticles.

Global self-regulation of the cellular metabolic structure.

Background: Different studies have shown that cellular enzymatic activities are able to self-organize spontaneously, forming a metabolic core of reactive processes that remain active under different growth conditions while the rest of the molecular catalytic reactions exhibit structural plasticity. This global cellular metabolic structure appears to be an intrinsic characteristic common to all cellular organisms. Recent work performed with dissipative metabolic networks has shown that the fundamental element for the spontaneous emergence of this global self-organized enzymatic structure could be the number of catalytic elements in the metabolic networks.

The number of catalytic elements is crucial for the emergence of metabolic cores.

Background: Different studies show evidence that several unicellular organisms display a cellular metabolic structure characterized by a set of enzymes which are always in an active state (metabolic core), while the rest of the molecular catalytic reactions exhibit on-off changing states. This self-organized enzymatic configuration seems to be an intrinsic characteristic of metabolism, common to all living cellular organisms. In a recent analysis performed with dissipative metabolic networks (DMNs) we have shown that this global functional structure emerges in metabolic networks with a relatively high number of catalytic elements, under particular conditions of enzymatic covalent regulatory activity.