NIH awards Scripps Research $13M grant to develop AIDS vaccine

A research team from the The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has been awarded a grant of over $13 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease of the National Institutes of Health to research antibodies that could lead to the development of a vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The project is titled “High Resolution Analysis of Env-directed B Cells to Accelerate Vaccine Design” and will focus on building antibodies to the virus and investigating their neutralizing capacity. HIV has been a challenging disease to develop vaccines against due to its unusual structure that helps it escape detection by the body’s immune system. However, a small group of HIV patients show an effective immune response to HIV. The B cells in these patients’ immune system produce antibodies that can neutralize a broad range of HIV strains. These broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNABs), though not able to stop infections in HIV-affected patients,...