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  • Year in Review
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VACCINES IN 2018

Advancing an HIV vaccine; advancing vaccinology

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 19, pages 77–78 (2019)Cite this article

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Of any pathogen, HIV provides perhaps the greatest challenge to successful vaccine development. Nevertheless, progress continued to be made in 2018; new vaccine concepts entered the clinic and new insights were obtained in basic research that will ultimately help to guide rational vaccine design against many ‘difficult’ pathogens.

Key advances

  • The fusion peptide of HIV Envelope (Env) has emerged as a potential vaccine target.

  • Naive B cell precursor frequencies and antigen affinities are crucial in considering the likelihood of success with a germline-targeting immunogen.

  • Off-target responses to immunogens can be reduced by glycan masking of irrelevant epitopes.

  • Neutralization, but not other immune parameters, correlates with HIV trimer vaccine-induced protection against viral challenge in a monkey model.

  • Electron microscopy is a rapid method to determine the specificities present in a polyclonal antibody response following vaccination or infection.

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Fig. 1: A sequential HIV immunization strategy.

References

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to S. Crotty, L. Hangartner, J. Mascola and A. Ward for comments on the manuscript and to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Immunology and Microbiology, the Scripps Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID), International AIDS Vaccine Initiative Neutralizing Antibody Center, Scripps Research, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Dennis R. Burton

  2. Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dennis R. Burton

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  1. Dennis R. Burton
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Correspondence to Dennis R. Burton.

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Burton, D.R. Advancing an HIV vaccine; advancing vaccinology. Nat Rev Immunol 19, 77–78 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-018-0103-6

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