Abstract
An effective vaccine is urgently needed to stop AIDS-epidemic. Up to now none of the candidate HIV-vaccines has been developed to prevent HIV-1 infection. A few neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 enveloping proteins proved to be highly effective to neutralize different strains in vitro. Unfortunately, these antibodies are rare in infected humans, and have never yet been raised by a vaccine. The multiple sequential and antigenic variability of HIV-1 led to unprecedented difficulties in development of effective vaccines and anti-viral drugs. More and more experimental evidences indicated that HIV-1 mutants resulted in immune evasion may be a grave challenge for conventional strategy to prepare effective vaccines. We suggested that epitope-vaccine could be a new strategy to induce high levels of neutralizing antibodies with predefined epitope-specificity against HIV-1. Several candidate epitope-vaccines including mono-epitope-vaccine, multi-epitope-vaccine, epitope-vaccines in combination, were prepared and systematically studied in animal experiments. These studies provided experimental evidences that epitope-vaccine could be a new strategy to develop effective vaccines for prevention and immunotherapy against viral infection of HIV-1 or other viruses.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 3-6 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | Immunology Letters |
Volume | 77 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 1 2001 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- CTL-epitope
- Epitope-vaccine
- HIV-1
- Neutralizing epitope
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Immunology and Allergy
- Immunology