Viral Protein Particles Enable Strain-Specific Antibody Production.(Brief Article)

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

by Michael Greer, senior medical writer - Immunogenic particles made up of HIV proteins can act as a strain-specific vaccine in rhesus macaques, enabling them to produce effective immune responses to HIV infection challenges, researchers report.

"The ability to generate antibodies that cross-neutralize diverse primary isolates is an important goal for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) vaccine development," wrote David C. Montefiori and colleagues at Duke University, North Carolina, and other institutions. "Most of the candidate HIV 1 vaccines tested in humans and nonhuman primates have failed in this regard."

Montefiori and team's effort successfully induced the creation of antibodies to a macrophage-tropic (R5) HIV strain, which, while still strain-specific, shows the possibility of a novel approach to vaccine creation, they said.

The researchers administered virus-like particles (VLP) made up of Gag, Env, and Pro envelope proteins from the R5 strain HIV-1[Bx08] to primates. The use of an R5 strain was a departure from previous vaccine research which, they noted, "focused almost entirely on the envelope glycoproteins of a small number of T-cell line-adapted strains of virus as immunogens." Vaccine delivery was done with pure VLP, recombinant viral DNA, canarypox vectors expressing VLP, or all three, according to their report.

Animals vaccinated with pure VLP, a combination of recombinant viral DNA and VLP or viral DNA followed by VLP-expressing vector support were able to create antibodies capable of neutralizing HIV[Bx08]. Although ...