artificial antigen

[hahaha]

Thought this is very interesting.  Scientist is now designing artificial antigen (instead of trial and error) of b12....

One of the great challenges for the design of an effective HIV-1 vaccine is the design of an immunogen that will evoke neutralizing antibody responses to a broad spectrum of the different HIV isolates now circulating. Unlike the current vaccines that were invented mostly by trial and error, HIV-1, to date, has resisted all such empirical efforts and, thus, a rational vaccine design approach is necessary. To evoke an effective virus-neutralizing immune response to HIV-1, one logical target to consider is the site of viral attachment to the cellular receptor. The paper under evaluation has advanced the feasibility of this approach by solving the high resolution crystal structure of the envelope protein, gp120, bound to a broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibody, b12, that recognizes the CD4-binding site. Zhou and colleagues’ work provides a ‘molecular map’ of this domain to accelerate a rational immunogen-design effort with the potential to offer a host of novel vaccine candidates for evaluation.

[milker]

I would imagine that the problem with this is to make a pill that would create millions of antigens ? Or it's something you'd have to inject ?

Milker.

[JPinLA]

I'm not too familiair with this work, since the reference was not included, however if it is going to be used to design a vaccine, it will be injected.  My undertsanding is that the work from these folks is meant to elucidate the business parts of gp120 (i.e. the structural domains where it is active and where neutralizing antibodies bind and blcok acitivty).  I think they are using b12 to help locate and defien these domains since it is broadly neutralizing (i assume to many different forms of gp120 epitopes, which would represent mutated forms of HIV-1) in order to create immungens (vaccines) that would produce neutrliaizng antibodies against many forms/epitopes of gp120 to be effective against different forms of HIV-1.

Of course, not havign read the paper, I am drawing assumptions from the descritpion provided by hahaha.  Could you provide the reference?

JP