Rutgers AIDS researchers Gail Ferstandig Arnold and Eddy Arnold may have turned a corner in their search for a HIV vaccine.
In a paper just published in the Journal of Virology, the husband and wife duo and their colleagues report on their research progress.
With the support of the National Institutes of Health, the Arnolds and their team have been able to take a piece of HIV that is involved with helping the virus enter cells, put it on the surface of a common cold virus, and then immunize animals with it. They found that the animals made antibodies that can stop an unusually diverse set of HIV isolates or varieties.
Some researchers have previously been able to elicit effective antibodies, but usually only against a very limited number of HIV types. With HIV's known propensity to mutate, antibodies developed against one local strain may not recognize and combat mutant varieties elsewhere. These geographic varieties with different mutations constitute one of the great challenges to finding a broad spectrum vaccine capable of protecting against the vast array of HIV varieties.
The approach taken by the Arnolds and their colleagues has been to identify a part of the AIDS virus that is crucial to its viability - something the virus needs in order to complete its life cycle - and then target this Achilles heel.
"The part that we targeted plays a role in the ability of HIV to enter cells, and is common to most HIV varieties," Gail Ferstandig Arnold said. "That is a mechanism that would not be easy for the virus to reinvent on the fly, so it turns out to be a really helpful target."
The Arnolds are both members of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, a joint center of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Also, Gail Ferstandig Arnold is a research professor and Eddy Arnold is a professor, both in Rutgers' Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
While most vaccines are actually made from the pathogen itself, employing weakened or inactivated organisms to stimulate antibody production, HIV is just too dangerous to use as the basis for a vaccine vehicle. What the Arnolds have done is to use the relatively innocuous cold-causing rhinovirus and attach the target portion of the HIV. This must be done in a way that maintains the HIV part's shape so that when the immune system sees it, it will actually mount an immune response as it would to the real HIV.
"The idea is to trick the immune system into thinking it is acting upon HIV before the virus shows actually shows up on the scene," said Eddy Arnold.