Evaluating strategies for HIV vaccination
Through an investigation of a fundamental process that guides the maturation of immune cells, researchers have revealed new insights into possible ways to vaccinate people to generate potent antibodies of the type that are predicted to offer protection against diverse strains of the highly mutable HIV. The findings, described this week in the journal Cell, suggest that sequentially administering several different forms of a potential HIV vaccine could stimulate a stronger immune response than delivering a cocktail of these variants all at once. The study also sheds new light on a fundamental process of immune-cell development known as “affinity maturation.” “Our work describes how affinity maturation works when there are variant strains of the virus to contend with, and why cross-reactive antibodies that can protect against diverse strains of the virus usually do not arise during natural infection. But it does offer hope that a properly designed vaccination scheme that can manipulate...