Madrid
Updated:
Keep
Researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute have demonstrated a successful way to deliver an HIV vaccine, based on mRNA technology.
This approach uses mRNA within lipid nanoparticles that are capable of stimulating antibodies against HIV. The results of the study have been published in the journal «Cell Reports».
“This work demonstrates that we now have a practical platform to produce a complex HIV vaccine,” says Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. “mRNA technology has been very successful for Covid-19, and we had previously found that it was also effective for a Zika vaccine. However, HIV is much more complicated, so this is a big step forward.”
Haynes and his colleagues, including Drew Weissman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that mRNAs, which use genetic material to teach immune cells to recognize the target pathogen, can encode complex antigens that are key for the development of HIV vaccines.
Because HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, mutates rapidly, only certain places on its outer envelope remain intact. An effective vaccine requires perfectly structured proteins targeted at these sites to trigger the immune response, a technical hurdle that proved challenging with previous vaccine technologies.
This team has been able to build an mRNA vaccine that could encode the acquisition of critical mutations and monoclonal antibodies that neutralize various types of HIV.
“These results may mark the next era of mRNA research,” says Weissman.
See them
comments