AUTHOR=Martín-Galiano Antonio J. , Díez-Fuertes Francisco , McConnell Michael J. , López Daniel TITLE=Predicted Epitope Abundance Supports Vaccine-Induced Cytotoxic Protection Against SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern JOURNAL=Frontiers in Immunology VOLUME=12 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.732693 DOI=10.3389/fimmu.2021.732693 ISSN=1664-3224 ABSTRACT=

The effect of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants on vaccine efficacy is of critical importance. In this study, the potential impact of mutations that facilitate escape from the cytotoxic cellular immune response in these new virus variants for the 551 most abundant HLA class I alleles was analyzed. Computational prediction showed that most of these alleles, that cover >90% of the population, contain enough epitopes without escape mutations in the principal SARS-CoV-2 variants. These data suggest that the cytotoxic cellular immune protection elicited by vaccination is not greatly affected by emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants.