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Review
. 2023 Mar 23:14:1126034.
doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2023.1126034. eCollection 2023.

Glycan masking in vaccine design: Targets, immunogens and applications

Cristina E Martina  1   2 , James E Crowe Jr  3   4   5 , Jens Meiler  1   2   6
Affiliations
Review

Glycan masking in vaccine design: Targets, immunogens and applications

Cristina E Martina et al. Front Immunol. .

Abstract

Glycan masking is a novel technique in reverse vaccinology in which sugar chains (glycans) are added on the surface of immunogen candidates to hide regions of low interest and thus focus the immune system on highly therapeutic epitopes. This shielding strategy is inspired by viruses such as influenza and HIV, which are able to escape the immune system by incorporating additional glycosylation and preventing the binding of therapeutic antibodies. Interestingly, the glycan masking technique is mainly used in vaccine design to fight the same viruses that naturally use glycans to evade the immune system. In this review we report the major successes obtained with the glycan masking technique in epitope-focused vaccine design. We focus on the choice of the target antigen, the strategy for immunogen design and the relevance of the carrier vector to induce a strong immune response. Moreover, we will elucidate the different applications that can be accomplished with glycan masking, such as shifting the immune response from hyper-variable epitopes to more conserved ones, focusing the response on known therapeutic epitopes, broadening the response to different viral strains/sub-types and altering the antigen immunogenicity to elicit higher or lower immune response, as desired.

Keywords: glycan masking; immuno-focusing; immuno-shifting; reverse vaccinology; vaccine design.

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Conflict of interest statement

JC has served as a consultant for Luna Labs USA, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corporation, Emergent Biosolutions, GlaxoSmithKline and BTG International Inc, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Meissa Vaccines, a former member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Gigagen (Grifols) and is founder of IDBiologics. The laboratory of JC received unrelated sponsored research agreements from AstraZeneca, Takeda, and IDBiologics. The remaining authors declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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