A generalized HIV vaccine design strategy for priming of broadly neutralizing antibody responses

Jon M. Steichen, Ying Cing Lin, Colin Havenar-Daughton, Simone Pecetta, Gabriel Ozorowski, Jordan R. Willis, Laura Toy, Devin Sok, Alessia Liguori, Sven Kratochvil, Jonathan L. Torres, Oleksandr Kalyuzhniy, Eleonora Melzi, Daniel W. Kulp, Sebastian Raemisch, Xiaozhen Hu, Steffen M. Bernard, Erik Georgeson, Nicole Phelps, Yumiko AdachiMichael Kubitz, Elise Landais, Jeffrey Umotoy, Amanda Robinson, Bryan Briney, Ian A. Wilson, Dennis R. Burton, Andrew B. Ward, Shane Crotty, Facundo D. Batista, William R. Schief

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

125 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Vaccine induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) to HIV remains a major challenge. Germline-targeting immunogens hold promise for initiating the induction of certain bnAb classes; yet for most bnAbs, a strong dependence on antibody heavy chain complementarity-determining region 3 (HCDR3) is a major barrier. Exploiting ultradeep human antibody sequencing data, we identified a diverse set of potential antibody precursors for a bnAb with dominant HCDR3 contacts. We then developed HIV envelope trimer–based immunogens that primed responses from rare bnAb-precursor B cells in a mouse model and bound a range of potential bnAb-precursor human naïve B cells in ex vivo screens. Our repertoire-guided germline-targeting approach provides a framework for priming the induction of many HIV bnAbs and could be applied to most HCDR3-dominant antibodies from other pathogens.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbereaax4380
JournalScience
Volume366
Issue number6470
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 6 Dec 2019

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