Rational design of a multiepitope vaccine encoding T-lymphocyte epitopes for treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus infections.

Sequences from 20 HBV isolates, including adr, adw, ayr, and ayw serotypes, were analyzed using text string search software to identify amino acid sequences of 15 or 20 amino acids containing HLA-DR supertype motifs. Peptide sequences that were represented in at least 45% of the HBV sequences were synthesized and tested. 4 of 4 cell pools (from 5 mice each) tested reacted above the positivity threshold of ≥30 SFC/10^6 CD4+ cells and a response ratio of ≥2.