Converging on an HIV Vaccine
- Bette Korber
,
Three decades after the discovery of AIDS we still do not have a vaccine against the causative agent, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Multidrug therapy can extend life and health for those with HIV, but only holds the virus at bay, making treatment a lifetime proposition. Access to treatment or other promising infection prevention measures such as topical microbicides (1) are an economic and social challenge. A vaccine would be a simple and direct strategy for prevention. On pages 1593 and 1633 of this issue, Wu et al. and Scheid et al. detail the trajectory of an immune response to natural HIV infection that may provide a path to a vaccine.
Focused Evolution of HIV-1 Neutralizing Antibodies Revealed by Structures and Deep Sequencing
- Xueling Wu
et al.
Antibody VRC01 is a human immunoglobulin that neutralizes about 90% of HIV-1 isolates. To understand how such broadly neutralizing antibodies develop, we used x-ray crystallography and 454 pyrosequencing to characterize additional VRC01-like antibodies from HIV-1–infected individuals. Crystal structures revealed a convergent mode of binding for diverse antibodies to the same CD4-binding-site epitope. A functional genomics analysis of expressed heavy and light chains revealed common pathways of antibody-heavy chain maturation, confined to the IGHV1-2*02 lineage, involving dozens of somatic changes, and capable of pairing with different light chains. Broadly neutralizing HIV-1 immunity associated with VRC01-like antibodies thus involves the evolution of antibodies to a highly affinity-matured state required to recognize an invariant viral structure, with lineages defined from thousands of sequences providing a genetic roadmap of their development.
Sequence and Structural Convergence of Broad and Potent HIV Antibodies That Mimic CD4 Binding
- Johannes F. Scheid
et al.
Passive transfer of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies can prevent infection, which suggests that vaccines that elicit such antibodies would be protective. Thus far, however, few broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies that occur naturally have been characterized. To determine whether these antibodies are part of a larger group of related molecules, we cloned 576 new HIV antibodies from four unrelated individuals. All four individuals produced expanded clones of potent broadly neutralizing CD4-binding-site antibodies that mimic binding to CD4. Despite extensive hypermutation, the new antibodies shared a consensus sequence of 68 immunoglobulin H (IgH) chain amino acids and arise independently from two related IgH genes. Comparison of the crystal structure of one of the antibodies to the broadly neutralizing antibody VRC01 revealed conservation of the contacts to the HIV spike.