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Helicobacter pylori is responsible for several gastric diseases. The main constraints of vaccine trials against this pathogen are mainly due to the bacterium high antigenic variability and to down-regulation of the host immune responses. To counteract these factors we propose a DNA vaccine able to induce a balanced humoural and citotoxic specific immune responses, based on multi-antigens. The selection of the antigens NapA, HpaA, VacA and HomB were conducted based on immunoproteomic data and the protein role on infection and pathogenesis. A fragment of each target-antigen was selected by in silico methods based on the maximization of the gene conservation and antigenicity. The set of these small fragments will be presented as a vaccine based on several conserved epitopes of multi-antigenic targets, and consequently representative of the bacterium antigenic variability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]