Training human antibodies to protect against HIV
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...