Advancing therapeutic vaccines for chronic hepatitis B: Integrating reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics

Figure 1 Overview of challenges in chronic hepatitis B and potential solutions through integrating reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics in therapeutic vaccines design. A: T cell and B cell exhaustion in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients contribute to the inability to eliminate hepatitis B virus (HBV) covalently closed circular DNA minichromosomes, allowing for continuous viral replication; B: Therapeutic vaccines present a promising alternative treatment for CHB, but their design encounters two major challenges: The selection of appropriate antigens and the genetic variability of HBV genotypes; C: Reverse vaccinology, combined with immunoinformatics, addresses these challenges by facilitating the identification of conserved epitopes across all HBV genotypes and predicting stable, immunogenic vaccine candidates. HBV: Hepatitis B virus; HBc: Hepatitis B virus core protein; HBx: Hepatitis B virus X protein; HBs: Hepatitis B virus surface protein. Created in BioRender.com (Supplementary material).