Monday, January 14, 2019

Scientists unveil promising new HIV vaccine strategy

An effective HIV vaccine has been notoriously hard to develop, in part due to the complexity and constant changes in Env, this retrovirus's envelope protein. In a recent paper published in Science Advances, scientists at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA described a new way to stabilize Env proteins in the desired shape and mount them on virus-like nanoparticles. Preclinical data showed that this new vaccine strategy elicited robust anti-HIV antibody responses in mice and rabbits; the team is currently further optimizing and testing the vaccine in macaque models.

Env proteins are expressed on the HIV envelope in trimers which significantly change shape when infecting a cell. By modifying the HR1 portion of Env, Assoc. Prof. Jiang Zhu and his team were able to stabilize the Env trimer in its pre-infection conformation, and apply them toward diverse HIV strains from around the world.

Read more at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181126105516.htm

- Arjun Kumar

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