Researchers at Duke University Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School have demonstrated an approach to HIV vaccine design that uses an altered form of HIV’s outer coating or envelope protein. The researchers showed that they could design HIV envelopes that could bind better to immature B cell receptors to create an enhanced immune response in an animal model. Immature B cells are the targets of vaccines, and when strongly targeted, they produce strong vaccine responses. The work of the Duke team was to improve on the ability of the HIV envelope to target immature B cells of the immune system.
