A huge thank you to the Ward and Wilson labs (Scripps), the Batista lab (Ragon) and our collaborators all over. This work has led to a clinical trial (https://buff.ly/4jHBMaH), which we're incredibly excited about. First results: soon! 🔜

One other antibody, 12C11, targets a different CD4 binding site epitope - reminiscent of human broadly neutralizing antibody CH103. Strikingly, the person from which CH103 was isolated ALSO had another lineage of CD4 binding site neutralizing antibody that co-evolved with it.

CD4 binding site sub-epitopes and even antibodies that target the fusion peptide - another extremely conserved region of HIV Env! One antibody, 21N13, which only shares ~40% of its sequence with known human bnAbs, targets THE EXACT SAME residues on the conserved CD4bs epitope...

Well - the approach that we took, vaccinating with a full Env trimer, led to the induction of antibodies that target all kinds of epitopes. We isolated monoclonal antibodies that target our intended site (the CD4 binding site), but also others that target different...

Also, monoclonal antibodies isolated from these animals show surprising neutralization breadth - our end goal! However, non-human primates do not have the exact precursor that our vaccine targets. What's happening, then?

...we see robust induction of germinal centers and somatic hypermutation typical of broadly neutralizing antibodies.

In non-human primates, we confirmed that there is a robust serum response to the epitope that we intended to generate antibodies against - the CD4 binding site.

...have the ability to become broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) as they target a very conserved region: the CD4 binding site (CD4bs) - engaging them specifically with a vaccine is a MUST in HIV vaccine research.

A little overdue, but in August we shared work on our HIV vaccine candidate in Science Immunology!

This vaccine is now in clinical trials... more on that (hopefully) soon 🤞 😄 What did we do...? ⬇️

https://buff.ly/4gxyqVi