AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, May 25, 1998
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
The tactic would use human leukocyte antigens (HLA) from people who resist HIV infection to identify HIV epitopes capable of stimulating potent anti-HIV immune responses.
The technique, which has been used to develop a candidate cancer vaccine that protects mice against cervical cancer (Ressing, M.F. et al., Cancer Res, 1996;56:582-8), could be applied not only to HIV but to other viral pathogens as well.
"Identification of virus-derived, HLA-restricted 'pilot' peptides from individuals who are immune to a specific virus has potential for the development of vaccines against many viral diseases," wrote Barbara Laumbacher and Rudolf Wank of the Institute for Immunology, Munich University, Germany.
Humans have a wide variety of HLA types. Different HLA types are associated with the intracellular transport and surface expression of different HIV epitopes.
Laumbacher and Wank noted that Kenyan and Gambian prostitutes who remain HIV negative despite high-level exposure to the virus have strong cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses to HIV. These CTL responses are associated with HLA-A28 and HLA-B35. The authors cited unpublished data showing that Caucasians with the HLA-A28 allele also are protected against HIV.
"Sequence-based typing indicates that the alleles A*68012 and A*6802 are associated with HIV resistance whereas A*68011 is not," they wrote. "It should be possible to identify the different HIV peptides that are presented in the context of A*68012 and A*6802."
Regions of HIV identified by these pilot peptides could subsequently be evaluated for their ability to prime CTL responses.
The corresponding author for this study is Rudolf Wank, Institut fur Immunologie, Universitat Munchen, D-80336 Munchen, Germany. Email: <wank@ifi.med.uni-muenchen.de>.
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