By Alison Roach
National Institutes of Health grants $2.7 million for vaccine reserach
The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S.’s largest government-funded medical research agency, has recently granted $2.7 million to four researchers working to further develop an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. One of these researchers is Jamie Scott, an SFU professor and Canada Research Chair in molecular immunity.
Scott is the principle investigator and the main contact on two grants going towards the project; she, along with Dr. Naveed Gulzar, wrote grant applications to both the NIH and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), with both institutes granting funding. Thanks to the NIH grant, the team working on this research has been expanded to now consist of Scott, Dr. Jose Nieva of the University of the Basque Country, Dr. Bill Degrado of the University of California in San Francisco, and Dr. Shan Lu of the University of Massachusetts.
The series of vaccines the team is working on are based on an original vaccine conceived of by Dr. Marinieve Montera, a former student of Scott’s, which is how Scott came to be involved in the project. These vaccines being developed are meant to induce the immune system to produce antibodies that will bind to and block infectivity of HIV.
Of the science behind the vaccines, Scott explains, “The site those antibodies are targeted against is the MPER, a sub-region of HIV’s envelope protein located on the virus’s surface, and mediates infection by binding to special receptors on immune cells. That is the first step in the entry of the viral genome into the cell.” The MPER provides a potentially accessible site that does not vary from virus to virus and that antibodies can focus on. This is important since the challenge to creating antibodies to fight HIV has been that it’s a constantly mutating virus. The idea is to focus on the MPER site on infectious virus as a conserved region that is necessary for infection, and to stop this process from taking place.
The crucial step forward that has been made in this project is the closer copying of the basic MPER structure than has been accomplished before. “We have shown that the basic MPER structure we’re using in our vaccines is very similar to the viral MPER; so we think we’re mimicking it better than other groups that are trying to do the same thing,” said Scott. The group of researchers now hopes to build on this work by producing the vaccine in various different formats with the new funding.
Scott’s lab’s role in the upcoming stages of the project includes making a DNA vaccine that will facilitate the synthesis of the MPER and the presentation of it to the immune system. In the larger scope, the team is now looking to work on engineering the MPER as a better vaccine, with the different vaccine formats helping to immunize with the MPER in a larger amount.
For the practical trials, Scott says, “[Dr. Lu’s] lab and my lab will test the antibodies the animals make for their ability to block the infectivity of HIV. We’ll be so happy if that works. It will be a first, very important step!” The potential implications of the project are huge. If the team develops an effective vaccine that produces positive results in test subjects in the lab, it could prove to be a crucial step towards creating a preventative vaccine for HIV/AIDS.
