Machine learning-enhanced immunopeptidomics applied to T-cell epitope discovery for COVID-19 vaccines

The identification of T cell epitopes is a critical step in understanding the immune response to infection and in designing vaccine-based approaches. Here the authors introduce a framework of antigen discovery called MHCvalidator and Epitrack to identify new antigenic features for T-cell COVID-19 vaccines and characterize a novel non-canonical epitope from a truncated Spike variant and mutation of an immunodominant epitope in the BNT162b4 vaccine.