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These broadly neutralizing antibodies can recognize many different iterations of the virus. "They are not capturing only the first or second version of the virus that they ran into," says Michel Nussenzweig, a molecular immunologist at The Rockefeller University and co-senior author on two of the studies. "They retain the ability to catch all of the virus mutations they've seen before." When produced naturally, these antibodies don't pack enough punch to cure the systemic infection, but they could be strong enough to prevent the infection if induced by a vaccine. As a conceptual test, using mice genetically engineered to simulate the human immune system, Nussenzweig's group devised a way to train the immune system and produce a class of antibodies called PGT121 that react to diverse strains of HIV. The human immune system contains multiple different precursors, only a few of which could give rise to PGT121 antibodies, so the researchers first h...

It appears that antibodies can target these holes, which are scattered in HIV's protective sugar or "glycan" shield, and the question is now whether these holes can be exploited to induce protective antibodies. "It's important now to evaluate future vaccine candidates to more rapidly understand the immune response they induce to particular glycan holes and learn from it," said TSRI Professor Dennis R. Burton, who is also scientific director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) Neutralizing Antibody Center and of the National Institutes of Health's Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID) at TSRI. The study, published recently in the journal  Cell Reports , was co-led by Burton, TSRI Associate Professor Andrew Ward, also of CHAVI-ID, and Rogier W. Sanders of the University of Amsterdam and Cornell University. A Clue to Stopping HIV Every virus has a signature structure, like the architecture of a...