Xiao Y, Lu Y, Chen Y H
Laboratory of Immunology, Research Centre for Medical Science and Department of Biology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People's Republic of China.
Immunol Lett. 2001 May 1;77(1):3-6. doi: 10.1016/s0165-2478(01)00187-0.
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-l or other viruses.
迫切需要一种有效的疫苗来阻止艾滋病的流行。到目前为止，尚未开发出任何一种候选HIV疫苗来预防HIV-1感染。少数针对HIV-1包膜蛋白的中和抗体在体外被证明对中和不同毒株非常有效。不幸的是，这些抗体在受感染的人类中很罕见，并且从未通过疫苗产生过。HIV-1的多重序列和抗原变异性给有效疫苗和抗病毒药物的开发带来了前所未有的困难。越来越多的实验证据表明，导致免疫逃逸的HIV-1突变体可能是制备有效疫苗的传统策略面临的严峻挑战。我们认为表位疫苗可能是一种新的策略，可诱导产生针对HIV-1具有预定义表位特异性的高水平中和抗体。制备了几种候选表位疫苗，包括单表位疫苗、多表位疫苗、联合表位疫苗，并在动物实验中进行了系统研究。这些研究提供了实验证据，表明表位疫苗可能是开发用于预防和免疫治疗HIV-1或其他病毒感染的有效疫苗的新策略。
