a novel chimeric vaccine targeting leukemia inhibitory factor and leukemia inhibitory factor receptor: a computational approach to cancer immunotherapy

Background: leukemia inhibitory factor (lif) and lif receptor (lifr) are critical mediators of cellular processes, including immune regulation, stem cell maintenance, and tumor progression. in oncology, aberrant lif/lifr signaling promotes tumor survival and immune evasion. this study presents the computational design of a novel chimeric vaccine targeting immunogenic epitopes derived from human lif and lifr. materials and methods: we employed comprehensive in silico methods to investigate the biochemical characteristics, immunogenic epitopes, and potential functional domains of lif and lifr. after identifying suitable regions and designing a chimeric vaccine, physicochemical properties and 3d structure were predicted using various bioinformatics tools, both individually and in combination. results: the results showed highly antigenic b-cell and t-cell epitopes within lif (amino acids 70-100) and lifr (amino acids 700-780), as indicated by a vaxijen score of 0.9737. a multi-epitope construct was engineered by fusing selected epitopes with flexible ggggs linkers to enhance immunogenicity and structural stability. conclusion: a computationally designed chimeric vaccine targeting lif and lifr is a promising cancer immunotherapy strategy. also, success requires rigorous in vivo validation and optimization, highlighting computational biology's role in cancer treatment innovation and targeting key pathways.