Study offers new way to discover HIV vaccine targets

Decades of research and three large-scale clinical trials have so far failed to yield an effective HIV vaccine, in large part because the virus evolves so rapidly that it can evade any vaccine-induced immune response.

Researchers from the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard University have now developed a new approach to vaccine design that may allow them to cut off those evolutionary escape routes. The researchers have developed and experimentally validated a computational method that can analyze viral protein sequences to determine how well different viral strains can reproduce in the body. That knowledge gives researchers an unprecedented guide for identifying viral vulnerabilities that could be exploited to design successful vaccine targets.

The team, led by Arup Chakraborty, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Biological Engineering at MIT, has designed protein fragments (peptides) that would target these weaknesses. Ragon Institute researchers are now developing ways to deliver the peptides so they can be tested in animals.

"We think that, if it continues to be validated against laboratory and clinical data, this method could be quite useful for rational design of the active component of a vaccine for diverse viruses. Furthermore, if delivered properly, the peptides we have designed may be able to mount potent responses against HIV across a population," says Chakraborty, who is also the director of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Chakraborty and his colleagues describe their findings in the March 21 issue of the journal Immunity. Lead author of the paper is Andrew Ferguson, a former postdoc in Chakraborty's lab who is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Other authors are Bruce Walker, director of the Ragon Institute and a professor at Harvard Medical School; Thumbi Ndung'u of the Ragon Institute and the Doris Duke Medical Research Institute in South Africa; and Jaclyn Mann and Saleha Omarjee of the Doris Duke Medical Research Institute.

"This work stems from the novel approach to science that is the central mission of the Ragon Institute: to draw researchers from diverse scientific disciplines to catalyze new advances, the ultimate mission being to harness the immune system to prevent and cure human diseases," Walker says.

Rapid evolution

Typically when a vaccine for a disease such as smallpox or polio is given, exposure to viral fragments primes the body's immune system to respond powerfully if it encounters the real virus. With HIV, it appears that when immune cells in a vaccinated person attack viral peptides that they recognize, the virus quickly mutates its protein sequences so immune cells no longer recognize them.

To overcome this, scientists have tried analyzing viral proteins to find amino acids that don't often mutate, which would suggest that they are critical to the virus's survival. However, this approach ignores the fact that mutations elsewhere in the protein can compensate when those seemingly critical amino acids are forced to evolve, Chakraborty says.