A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute
(TSRI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) has unveiled a new
technique for vaccine design that could be particularly useful against HIV and
other fast-changing viruses.
The report, which appears March 28, 2013, in Science
Express, the early online edition of the journal Science, offers a step toward
solving what has been one of the central problems of modern vaccine design: how
to stimulate the immune system to produce the right kind of antibody response
to protect against a wide range of viral strains. The researchers demonstrated
their new technique by engineering an immunogen (substance that induces
immunity) that has promise to reliably initiate an otherwise rare response
effective against many types of HIV.