Exclusion of HIV epitopes shared with human proteins is prerequisite for designing safer AIDS vaccines.

Background: The safety of a potential AIDS vaccine is an issue that will become critical at later stages of product development and needs to be addressed before it is too late.

Objective: In order to design safer vaccine, the HIV antigens, to be deployed in it, should be free of regions that are either present in human proteins or exhibit pronounced structural similarity to proteins responsible for important physiological functions.

Study Design: The approach is based on the use of an original matrix predicting the antigenic similarity of amino acids.