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Unlike a whole-virus vaccine that's big and complicated to produce, our innovation is just a single protein that's easy to make," said Jason McLellan, a professor of molecular biosciences at The University of Texas at Austin and co-lead author of the study. AI Pinpoints a Promising Viral Target The Texas research group used the AlphaFold 3 model to predict which of the roughly 35 surface proteins on MPXV the antibodies were most likely to bind. It had never been shown to be a target of neutralizing antibodies." Because MPXV is closely related to the virus responsible for smallpox, this insight may also guide the development of better vaccines or therapies for smallpox, which remains a concern due to its high fatality rate and potential misuse as a bioterrorism weapon. McLellan describes the strategy used in this work as "reverse vaccinology." "We started with people who survived infection with monkeypox virus, isolated antibodies that they naturally produced and worked backward to find what part of the virus acted as the antigen for those antibodies."