HIV virions budding from an infected T lymphocyte. The Cell Image Library, R. DourmashkinIn response to the initial flood of antibodies the immune system releases upon infection with HIV, the virus shifts the location of sugar groups on its envelope protein to evade detection. But in doing so, the virus creates new glycosylation patterns that can be recognized by different antibodies, which appear to target a much broader range of viruses.
The research, published Sunday (October 21) in Nature Medicine, suggests that focusing on eliciting antibodies with a wide range of different specificities, to both acute and chronic viruses, may be a promising strategy for vaccination.
“We had always assumed the first virus would be special,” eliciting the most broadly neutralizing antibodies, but the new work challenges this assumption, explained Hanneke Schuitemaker, an immunologist at the University of Amsterdam who did not participate in the research.
HIV is an especially tricky virus for vaccine developers. Many important viral proteins that could be targeted by antibodies, regions known as epitopes, are often hidden—and thereby protected from immune detection—until HIV binds to CD4-expressing target cells, including T lymphocytes and macrophages. Furthermore, HIV’s rapidly mutating genome allows it to ...
