ImmunoPrecise Antibodies Ltd. (NASDAQ:IPA) has announced a significant breakthrough in dengue vaccine development, identifying a highly conserved epitope across all four dengue virus serotypes using its proprietary artificial intelligence platform. The discovery, made using the company's LENSai™ platform powered by patented HYFT® technology, represents a critical step toward developing a universal dengue vaccine that could protect against all forms of the virus.
AI Platform Identifies Universal Viral Target
The breakthrough centers on the identification of a viral epitope that has remained unmutated across all four known dengue virus serotypes—DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3, and DENV-4. This conserved target potentially allows an epitope-based vaccine to activate the immune system to eliminate the virus regardless of which serotype causes infection.
"This breakthrough highlights a new frontier in AI-driven biology—where discovery is rooted in the biology of a virus itself," said Dr. Jennifer Bath, CEO of ImmunoPrecise Antibodies. "By confirming that our sequence-derived patented HYFT patterns match structural signatures across all dengue serotypes, we're setting the stage for a universal vaccine design framework."
The discovery was achieved entirely through computational methods, demonstrating the platform's power to translate complex biological data into actionable vaccine design without requiring traditional laboratory-based approaches.
Overcoming Decades-Long Challenge
Dengue vaccine development has faced significant obstacles due to the virus's complex nature. The four distinct, rapidly-evolving serotypes present unique challenges because immunity to one serotype does not guarantee protection from others, and prior infection can potentially worsen subsequent disease. Traditional vaccine research methods have struggled to identify viral components that are both exposed and truly conserved across all four serotypes.
The validation of ImmunoPrecise's discovery involved confirming that patented HYFT patterns derived from sequence data matched corresponding structural HYFTs across all four dengue serotypes. This was made possible through LENSai's integration of over 20 million proprietary Structural HYFTs (S-HYFTs), enabling the platform to overlay three-dimensional conformations onto sequence-level biological fingerprints.
Platform Expansion and Future Applications
Building on this dengue success, ImmunoPrecise plans to extend its AI-driven vaccine design platform to other high-impact infectious diseases, including HIV, Norovirus, and an improved RSV vaccine. Early-stage assessments are also underway to explore the platform's application in oncology for neoantigen vaccine development and tumor-specific epitope mapping.
"The implications appear to stretch far beyond the dengue virus," Bath noted. "This is a foundation that research indicates can now be applied to many other infectious diseases and potentially even certain types of cancer."
Technology Platform Details
The LENSai platform integrates patented HYFT® universal fingerprints with deep learning, structural predictions, and literature-mined knowledge graphs to rapidly identify and refine candidate epitopes. The system can infer conformational and functional structures from sequence data alone, bypassing time-consuming experimental techniques like crystallography or cryo-electron microscopy.
The technology's ability to traverse the full biological hierarchy—from DNA/RNA sequence to molecular structure to therapeutic relevance—enables full immunogen design and in silico immunogenicity screening, potentially reducing the time and cost of early-stage vaccine development.
ImmunoPrecise Antibodies is a techbio company that leverages multi-omics modeling and artificial intelligence through proprietary and patented technologies. The company maintains an integrated suite of capabilities to support therapeutic antibody discovery and development, with subsidiaries across North America and Europe.
