Optimal design of cocktail boosters to elicit a polyclonal response against related viral strains

Immune escape from previous antibody responses by variants of a pathogen is a common threat from frequently mutating viruses, like influenza or SARS-CoV2. A recently developed strategy for epidemic control of the latter is the administration of a cocktail vaccine booster made of ancestral strain and omicron strain (1:1), which has already undergone clinical trials and has been approved in some countries. By exploiting a mapping of models describing the evolutionary dynamics of B cells during affinity maturation to a simple quantum mechanical analog, we investigate the optimal antigen composition of the cocktail vaccine in order to best exploit immune memory generated by previous encounters of related pathogen strains.