Development of an anti-HIV vaccine eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies

Abstract

The extreme HIV diversity posts a great challenge on development of an effective anti-HIV vaccine. To solve this problem, it is crucial to discover an appropriate immunogens and strategies that are able to prevent the transmission of the diverse viruses that are circulating in the world. Even though there have been a number of broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies (bNAbs) been discovered in recent years, induction of such antibodies to date has only been observed in HIV-1 infection. Here, in this mini review, we review the progress in development of HIV vaccine in eliciting broad immune response, especially production of bNAbs, discuss possible strategies, such as polyvalent sequential vaccination, that facilitates B cell maturation leading to bNAb response.

Keywords: B cell maturation; Broadly neutralizing antibody; Diversity; HIV-1; Polyvalent vaccine.

Fig. 1

SHIVenv vaccine system. a The vaccine vector is derived from 293T transfections with three DNA plasmids: 1 pREC_SHIV_KB9 _gag/pol vector containing gag and pol coding sequence from SHIV_KB9 but lacking the LTRs or RNA packaging elements; 2 pREC_SHIV_KB9_env_Δgagpol vector which contains the RNA packaging signal, env and 3′LTR, but lacks 5′LTR, gag and pol sequences; 3 pCMV_SHIV_KB9_ cpltRU5 which contains only the 5′LTR, primer binding site, and the RNA packaging signal. b Generation of SHIVenv virus-like particles as HIV vaccine candidate through triple transfection. c Production of defective SHIV-1 proviral DNA and Env glycoproteins by pseudotyped virus containing the two complementary subgenomic viral RNAs