The next HIV vaccine was tested on animals
Doctors have successfully tested a prototype of "vaccination" against HIV in miceRIA NewsAn international team of physicians announced the successful formation of an immune response to several strains of HIV in mice, whose immune system they taught to recognize its particles using a "cocktail" of special proteins similar in structure to parts of the virus envelope, according to articles published in the journals Cell and Science (Dosenovic et al., Immunization for HIV-1 Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies in Human Ig Knockin Mice, Jardine et al., Priming a broadly neutralizing antibody response to HIV-1 using a germline-targeting immunogen and Sanders et al., HIV-1 neutralizing antibodies induced by native-like envelope trimmers – VM).
The immunodeficiency virus penetrates into human cells using a set of several proteins on the surface of its shell. Their structure and the structure of the hydrocarbon "shield" protecting them changes with each new generation of HIV, which forces the immune system to produce a new set of antibodies. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the virus becomes the winner in this "arms race", and this same feature prevents scientists from creating a vaccine or vaccination against HIV.
Three groups of scientists have found a way to counteract the elusive virus by teaching the animal's body to produce antibodies capable of neutralizing a large number of very different variants of HIV particles.
As immunologists explain (in a press release by The Rockefeller University Sequential immunizations could be the key to HIV vaccine - VM), 3-4 years after HIV infection, the human immune system often begins to synthesize so–called broad-spectrum antibodies (bNAbs) capable of neutralizing several varieties of the virus at once. This does not help the body much, since by this time the virus will already have time to penetrate deeply into all the tissues of the body and go into the chronic stage.
Dennis Burton from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (USA) and a number of other virologists "disassembled" the process of producing such antibodies in the cells of the immune system into small details and tried to transfer some of them into the mouse body, thereby trying to find a way to create a vaccine that would cause a similar effect.
Using three different techniques, scientists were able to reproduce the growth process of cells that produce such antibodies and formulate a strategy for creating an HIV vaccination that will force the body to produce bNAbs independently, without DNA modifications and other interventions in the life of immune cells.
According to scientists, HIV vaccination will be effective only if it is not based on a single component that mimics the structure of the virus envelope, but will consist of several similar particles. Two similar molecules have already been created by the authors of the article, one of which, eOD-GT8 60mer, successfully forced mouse immune cells to produce "billets" of bNAbs.
Burton and his colleagues have already partially put these strategies into practice by teaching the immune system of mice, rabbits and some species of monkeys to recognize and destroy several of the most secretive versions of HIV. In the near future, scientists will try different combinations of immunogens, trying to find the optimal "formula" for future vaccination.
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