Scripps Research Institute study explores barriers to HIV vaccine response study explores barriers to HIV vaccine response

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) discovered that an antibody that binds and neutralizes HIV likely also targets the body’s own “self” proteins. This finding could complicate the development of HIV vaccines designed to elicit this protective antibody, called 4E10, and others like it, as doing so might be dangerous or inefficient. “We developed two new mouse models that allow us to visualize the fate of the rare B cells that can see HIV and we thought could be stimulated by vaccines to produce neutralizing antibodies—the type of antibodies we seek to produce in response to a vaccine,” says David Nemazee, PhD, professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbial Science at TSRI and senior author of the study. “We were able to study vaccine responses of b12, an antibody that sees the CD4 binding site of HIV, but, surprisingly to us, not 4E10, an antibody that sees the stem...