Can artificial intelligence help us design vaccines?

As COVID-19 began to spread globally in late January, we used several of these machine learning tools to search for immunogenic components of the virus that would make good vaccine candidates. We scanned each viral protein from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to identify regions of the virus with strong antibody targets and a high likelihood of cell presentation. We were immediately struck by the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can be targeted by antibodies, as other researchers had begun speculating that the spike protein was essential for viral entry into lung cells. We further identified hundreds of viral protein fragments presentable on human cells. The fragment we mentioned earlier, SYGFQPTNGVGYQPY, is potentially both an antibody target and presentable.