Viral sequence diversity: challenges for AIDS vaccine designs

Abstract

Among the greatest challenges facing AIDS vaccine development is the intrinsic diversity among circulating populations of HIV-1 in various geographical locations and the need to develop vaccines that can elicit enduring protective immunity to variant HIV-1 strains. While variation is observed in all of the viral proteins, the greatest diversity is localized to the viral envelope glycoproteins, evidently reflecting the predominant role of these proteins in eliciting host immune recognition and responses that result in progressive evolution of the envelope proteins during persistent infection. Interestingly, while envelope glycoprotein variation is widely assumed to be a major obstacle to AIDS vaccine development, there is very little experimental data in animal or human lentivirus systems addressing this critical issue. In this review, the state of vaccine development to address envelope diversity will be presented, focusing on the use of centralized and polyvalent sequence design as mechanisms to elicit broadly reactive immune responses.

Keywords::

• centralized
• consensus
• HIV-1
• polyvalent
• vaccine
• viral diversity

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Hermancia S Eugene and Jodi K Craigo for helpful discussions and Dilhari DeAlmeida and Corey Crevar for technical assistance.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

SP McBurney received a Pittsburgh AIDS Research Training fellowship AI065380-02 from the NIH/NIAID. TM Ross is supported by the research grant award R01AI068507 from NIH/NIAID. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.