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The Scripps Consortium for HIV / AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD), an international collaboration led by Scripps Research, has received a $ 129 million grant from National Institutes of Health to advance next-generation vaccines designed for to induce the immune system to produce antibodies capable of disarming many strains of HIV.
The seven-year grant from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will support the development and manufacture of new candidate vaccines so that they can move to early clinical trials on the NIHB. man. Candidate vaccine products are designed to be administered in several steps to induce immune system proteins called general neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs). In many animal studies, bnAb has been shown to provide long-lasting protection against exposure to multiple strains of HIV.
The award will fund the Scripps CHAVD consisting of 26 researchers: eight senior researchers from Scripps Research and 18 senior researchers from 13 other CHAVD-affiliated scientific organizations, including projects at four foreign sites.
Previous NIH support for this international collaboration has allowed us to lay the scientific foundation for an unprecedented and highly promising approach to HIV vaccination. This new award provides critical funding to refine this approach and integrate it into clinical trials on humans. "
Dennis Burton, Director of Scripps CHAVD and Co-Chair of Scripps Research's Department of Immunology and Microbiology
Representative Mike Levin, whose congressional district includes Scripps Research, said about the NIH's recently announced grant that he was "delighted to see this vital federal funding directed to our region for health research and development." Of crucial importance ".
"I am proud to represent many leading research and biotechnology institutions and to advocate for strong federal investments to support this important sector of our region," added Levin. "Scripps Research is one of the world's leading research institutions and their efforts – with their international partners – to develop an HIV vaccine could save millions of lives."
Currently, drug therapy called antiretroviral therapy can suppress HIV to undetectable levels in the blood and prevent badual transmission of the virus. In addition, HIV acquisition can be prevented by pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP; post-exposure prophylaxis or PEP; and voluntary adult male medical circumcision. Despite these forms of HIV prevention, 1.8 million people became infected with HIV worldwide in 2017 (about 1 person every 15 seconds) and nearly 37 million people were living with the virus, highlighting the urgency to develop a vaccine to stop the epidemic.
The goal of developing an HIV vaccine has been extremely difficult to achieve. The virus presents a significant challenge because its slippery surface provides few targets for the immune system and its ability to evolve rapidly allows it to surpbad the immune response and current vaccination efforts. Many different strains of HIV circulate among people living with the virus at any one time; only one person can carry hundreds of thousands of variants of the virus.
Burton and his colleagues opened a new front in the design of an HIV vaccine in 2009 when they discovered two potent antibodies in the blood cells of a woman living with HIV, able to neutralize 70% of the 162 HIV reference strains representative of the global epidemic. This has raised the possibility of designing vaccines that could cause a person's immune system to generate such bnAb, thus offering extended protection against several strains of HIV.
To deepen this innovative concept in the field of HIV vaccine research, the Scripps Center for Immunology Research on HIV / AIDS Vaccines (CHAVI-ID) was created in 2012 through a grant. $ 77 million from NIAID. As explained below, the work of CHAVI-ID, which officially ends on June 30, 2019, has advanced many vaccine concepts and innovative candidates as a prelude to the ongoing efforts being made to support the award. Scripps CHAVD.
By integrating a number of scientific fields with advanced imaging and other technologies, CHAVI-ID has made significant progress in identifying stable regions on the outer layer of HIV, or "envelopes", that can to be targeted by the bnAb. Based on this knowledge, they have developed immunogens (molecules that cause an immune response in the body) that, in animal studies, have demonstrated their ability to induce the production of anti-HIV bnAb or their early precursors that target these regions of the envelope and neutralize the virus.
The new NIH award will support research that builds on this earlier work, with a focus on the development of a sequential regimen that induces sustained protective levels of anti-HIV bnAb. The Center's research has shown that natural bnA develops in a person's body over the years as a result of repeated exposures to many strains of HIV. The sequential vaccine approach seeks to improve this process by generating bnAbs with a small number of given protein immunogens successively in a short time.
The new award will focus on refining immunogens, developing scalable manufacturing methods and providing the immunogens needed to test the sequential vaccine schedule in early clinical trials. In partnership with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), researchers will launch the first human clinical trial of the sequential vaccination strategy this year. Funding for the new grant will allow Scripps CHAVD to test several clbades of bnAb-inducing immunogens in further trials.
"We are looking for several bnAb sites with the ultimate goal of combining immunogens targeting different sites to provide the scope and power needed for an effective vaccine," Burton said.
Source:
Scripps Research Institute
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