Features of Broad T Cell Coronavirus Immunity

Project 2 Summary Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, has quickly become a global health crisis of epic proportion.

This pandemic, along with the SARS-CoV epidemic of 2002 and MERS-CoV epidemic of 2012, highlights the tremendously dangerous ongoing threat to humanity posed by emerging human-tropic coronaviruses that are transitioning from bats and other wildlife species into humans.

Thus, while early vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 have already demonstrated remarkable efficacy, next generation vaccines should deliver broad protection against a wide spectrum of coronaviruses as well as improved robustness against newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants that threaten immune escape.

The overall goal of this program is to design a pan-coronavirus vaccine strategy by coupling key immunological information regarding the B cell and antibody response (Project 1) with the T cell response (Project 2) from SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination to advanced structural design and vaccine delivery strategies (Project 3).

This synergistic program seeks to design a protective, durable vaccine able to induce immunity across a spectrum of human as well as zoonotic coronaviruses.

To do so will require a better understanding of the immunodominant epitopes targeted by B cells and T cells as well as the extent of cross-reactivity these responses have against conserved epitopes across coronavirus species.

For T cells, which is the focus of Project 2, durable pan-coronavirus immunity will likely require robust cross-reactive responses by multiple effector subsets, including T helper type 1 (TH1), T follicular helper (TFH), and cytotoxic T cells (CTL) generated in both circulating and respiratory mucosal tissue-resident compartments.

The overall goal of this project is to apply the knowledge gained from our studies of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells in convalescent COVID-19 patients and vaccinees as well as innovative new experimental designs in mouse models to inform the design of vaccine immunogens by Project 3 that will maximize cross-reactive, yet durable and functionally diverse T cell immunity that will protect against multiple coronaviruses.

We hypothesize that the quality of T cell immunity to coronaviruses varies by epitope and that pan-coronavirus vaccine design should incorporate epitopes based collectively on immunodominance, functional diversity, and breadth of cross-reactivity. The studies in this project will identify the best epitopes for this purpose.

Specifically, we propose: 1) To identify SARS-CoV-2 CD4+ T cell epitopes from studies of convalescent COVID-19 patients and vaccinees that exhibit the greatest extent of immunodominance, durability, and cross-reactivity; 2) Evaluate the efficacy of cross-reactive CD4+ T cell epitopes in novel vaccine immunogens to induce protective immune responses in animal models; and 3) Discover new MHC class I epitopes using innovative screening technologies and evaluate their ability to generate protective CD8+ T cell responses in mice.