Technical Report abstract


Nature Medicine 13, 100 - 106 (2006)
Published online: 24 December 2006 | doi:10.1038/nm1461

Polyvalent vaccines for optimal coverage of potential T-cell epitopes in global HIV-1 variants

Will Fischer1,7, Simon Perkins1,7, James Theiler1, Tanmoy Bhattacharya1,2, Karina Yusim1, Robert Funkhouser1, Carla Kuiken1, Barton Haynes3, Norman L Letvin4, Bruce D Walker5, Beatrice H Hahn6 & Bette T Korber1,2


HIV-1/AIDS vaccines must address the extreme diversity of HIV-1. We have designed new polyvalent vaccine antigens comprised of sets of 'mosaic' proteins, assembled from fragments of natural sequences via a computational optimization method. Mosaic proteins resemble natural proteins, and a mosaic set maximizes the coverage of potential T-cell epitopes (peptides of nine amino acids) for a viral population. We found that coverage of viral diversity using mosaics was greatly increased compared to coverage by natural-sequence vaccine candidates, for both variable and conserved proteins; for conserved HIV-1 proteins, global coverage may be feasible. For example, four mosaic proteins perfectly matched 74% of 9-amino-acid potential epitopes in global Gag sequences; 87% of potential epitopes matched at least 8 of 9 positions. In contrast, a single natural Gag protein covered only 37% (9 of 9) and 67% (8 of 9). Mosaics provide diversity coverage comparable to that afforded by thousands of separate peptides, but, because the fragments of natural proteins are compressed into a small number of native-like proteins, they are tractable for vaccines.

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  1. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
  2. Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA.
  3. Duke University, Department of Medicine, Room 107 Circuit Drive, PO Box 3258, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA.
  4. Harvard-Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 41 Avenue of Louis Pasteur, Re Room 113, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
  5. Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital-East, 149 13th Street, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA.
  6. University of Alabama at Birmingham, Kaul Building 816 - 720 20th Street South, Birmingham, Alabama 35294, USA.
  7. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Correspondence to: Bette T Korber1,2 e-mail: btk@lanl.gov




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