jmone at MARAUDER.MILLERSV.EDU ("Jay Mone'") wrote:
>An HIV vaccine poses a unique problem: We don't know what a
>protective immune response against HIV is. If you don't know what are
>the most important immune parameters, it is difficult to rationally
>devise a vaccine. With that said, a vaccine against HIV would
>probably need to induce neutralizing antibodies against the spike
>proteins gp120, and perhaps gp41. In addition, it would probably be
>desireable to induce an effective cell mediated immune response.
Except that neutralizing abs to gp120 or gp41 do not correlate with
protective immunity! Subunit vaccines fail, too, because they a)
target hypervariable regions that the immune response evades and b)
aren't glycosylated.
Despite being a core protein, a humoral response to p24 and its
conserved regions may be better for that arm. Defining appropriate
HIV antigens to elicit maximally suppressive CTL response to a broad
spectrum of HIV species would be a most effective design. (Don't
restrict research to lab strains that bear little resemblance to
primary isolates.)
>This
>usually requires an attenuated vaccine, rather than a killed or a
>subunit vaccine.
This is probably a better approach.
George M. Carter
