Can A "Universal" HIV-1 Vaccine Be Developed?(Brief Article)

2001 JUL 11 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

Some researchers fear that vaccinations designed to target a single HIV-1 strain wouldn't offer sufficient protection from all versions of the virus.

Vaccines based on the viral forms most common in the United States and Europe - namely, a subtype called clade B - might prove useless for fighting the HIV-1 strains found in other parts of the world such as Africa.

What are the prospects for developing a "universal" HIV-1 vaccine, capable of fighting all clades of the virus, and what's the best research strategy? One perspective on these questions was addressed by researcher Anne S. De Groot, who offered an optimistic viewpoint in a peer-reviewed research review article published on the AIDScience.com website.

New bioinformatics tools, which use computer power to analyze genetic sequence information, are now at hand to support a universal or "cross-clade" vaccine, says De Groot, a Brown University scientist.

To create a broadly effective vaccine, De Groot contends, researchers must identify regions of HIV-1's genetic sequence that stimulate immune response universally, or, across all versions of the virus. After all, she says, "Just as there may be certain words that are conserved in all dialects of French, there may be a set of epitopes that are conserved across all strains and clades of HIV."

But, analyzing all known HIV-1 sequences to locate universally important segments is no small task: public databases now include more than 44,000 HIV-1 protein sequences, and the virus is constantly mutating and recombining. Fortunately, several computer-based algorithms are now on hand to help researchers pinpoint important bits of genetic sequence common to various HIV-1 strains.