Patent ID: 7981601

Claim:
A method for preparing polyepitope chimeric gene vaccines, the method comprising the steps of: a) selecting, synthesizing, and cloning Into a vector a plurality of nucleic acid molecules each encoding a single epitope of an antigen of interest; b) constructing nucleic acid molecules encoding randomly combined bi-epitopes in the vectors of step a) by isocaudamer linkage; c) randomly assembling the nucleic acid molecules encoding bi-epitopes into polyepitope chimeric genes with different lengths; d) (i) isolating the polyepitope chimeric genes with different lengths into a plurality of different length ranges, (ii) purifying and amplifying the isolated polyepitope chimeric genes, (iii) subcloning the isolated polyepitope chimeric genes into expression vectors to obtain polyepitope chimeric gene expression libraries, e) assessing the diversity of the polyepitope chimeric genes in the polyepitope chimeric gene expression libraries; f) (i) immunizing animals with the polyepitope chimeric gene expression libraries to provide expression products of the genes; (ii) detecting the immunogenicity of the expression products of the genes; g) selecting at least one polyepitope chimeric gene expression library based on the diversity of the polyepitope gene expression libraries and the immunogenicity of the expression products of the genes in the polyepitope gene expression libraries; and h) screening the selected at least one polyepitope chimeric gene expression library to identify polyepitope chimeric gene clones for use as polyepitope chimeric gene vaccines.