The year 2021 marks the 40th anniversary since physicians recognized symptoms of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease that has since caused more than 30 million deaths worldwide. Despite the passing of four decades, there remains no licensed vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), the etiologic agent of AIDS. Despite the development of outstanding anti-retroviral drugs, there are currently more than one-half million deaths each year due to AIDS. Here, we revisit a conventional vaccine strategy used for protection against variable pathogens like HIV-1, which combines an array of diverse surface antigens. The strategy uses antibody recognition patterns to categorize viruses and their surface antigens into groups. Then a leader is assigned for each group and group leaders are formulated into vaccine cocktails. The group leaders are 'natural mosaics', because they share one or more epitope(s) with each of the other group members. We encourage the application of this conventional approach to HIV-1 vaccine design. We suggest that the partnering of an antibody-instructed envelope cocktail with new vaccine vectors will yield a successful vaccine in the HIV-1 field.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8151930 | PMC |
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/v13050884 | DOI Listing |
Vaccines (Basel)
January 2025
National Key Laboratory of Intelligent Tracking and Forecasting for Infectious Diseases, National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 100052, China.
Background: The development of a protective vaccine is critical for conclusively ending the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic.
Methods: We constructed nucleotide-modified mRNA vaccines expressing HIV-1 Env and Gag proteins. Env-gag virus-like particles (VLPs) were generated through co-transfection with env and gag mRNA vaccines.
Vaccines (Basel)
January 2025
The Jenner Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7DQ, UK.
After four decades of intensive research, traditional vaccination strategies for HIV-1 remain ineffective due to HIV-1's extraordinary genetic diversity and complex immune evasion mechanisms. Cytomegaloviruses (CMV) have emerged as a novel type of vaccine vector with unique advantages due to CMV persistence and immunogenicity. Rhesus macaques vaccinated with molecular clone 68-1 of RhCMV (RhCMV68-1) engineered to express simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) immunogens elicited an unconventional major histocompatibility complex class Ib allele E (MHC-E)-restricted CD8 T-cell response, which consistently protected over half of the animals against a highly pathogenic SIV challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNoncoding RNA
January 2025
Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Background: Despite tremendous advances in antiretroviral therapy (ART) against HIV-1 infections, no cure or vaccination is available. Therefore, discovering novel therapeutic strategies remains an urgent need. In that sense, miRNAs and miRNA therapeutics have moved intensively into the focus of recent HIV-1-related investigations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Immunol
January 2025
Department I of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Cologne, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Antiretroviral therapy is the standard treatment for HIV, but it requires daily use and can cause side effects. Despite being available for decades, there are still 1.5 million new infections and 700,000 deaths each year, highlighting the need for better therapies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA primary goal in the development of an AIDS vaccine is the elicitation of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) that protect against diverse HIV-1 strains. To this aim, germline-targeting immunogens have been developed to activate bNAb precursors and initiate the induction of bNAbs. While most pre-clinical germline-targeting HIV-1 vaccine candidates only target a single bNAb precursor epitope, an effective HIV-1 vaccine will likely require bNAbs that target multiple epitopes on Env.
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