Researchers Unravel Pathways of Potent Antibodies that Fight HIV Infection

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DURHAM, N.C. – One of the most crucial and elusive goals of an effective HIV vaccine is to stimulate antibodies that can attack the virus even as it relentlessly mutates.
Now a research team, led by investigators at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has tracked rare potent antibodies in an HIV-infected individual and determined sequential structures that point to how they developed. 
The details form a blueprint that will help guide researchers as they try to build an experimental vaccine that recreates the pathway that gives rise to the important broadly neutralizing antibodies.
The findings are reported online March 3 in the journal Cell.
“We have followed a less potent neutralizing lineage in this particular individual before, but now we have found a far more potent antibody and have been able to study its development over six years,” said first author Mattia Bonsignori, M.D., of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. “With sequential structures, we can see the changes that occurred in both antibody and virus.” 
The work was aided by the identification six years ago of a person in Africa whose HIV was diagnosed within weeks of infection and who provided blood samples to researchers periodically from t...

Source: DukeHealth.org: Duke Health Features - March 5, 2016 Category: Pediatrics Tags: Duke Medicine Source Type: news