HIV vaccine protects non-human primates from infection

For more than 20 years, scientists at Scripps Research have chipped away at the challenges of designing an HIV vaccine. Now new research, published in Immunity, shows that their experimental vaccine strategy works in non-human primates. The new study shows that rhesus macaque monkeys can be prompted to produce neutralizing antibodies against one strain of HIV that resembles the resilient viral form that most commonly infects people, called a Tier 2 virus. The research also provides the first-ever estimate of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels needed to protect against HIV.
"We found that neutralizing antibodies that have been induced by vaccination can protect animals against viruses that look a lot like real-world HIV," says Dennis Burton, Ph.D., chair of Scripps Research's Department of Immunology and Microbiology, and scientific director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) Neutralizing Antibody Center and of the National Institutes of Health's Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID). Although the vaccine is far from human clinical trials, the study provides proof-of-concept for the HIV vaccine strategy Burton and his colleagues have been developing since the 1990s.