Infant HIV-1 Vaccines

HIV-1 Tat vaccines.

The inexorable spreading of the HIV pandemic and the increasing deaths for AIDS in the developing countries underscore the urgency for an effective, safe and inexpensive vaccine against AIDS. Although many attempts have been made, a candidate vaccine of proven efficacy and safety in non-human primate models is not yet available. This is mostly due to HIV envelope (Env) variability and to the di...

HIV-1 vaccines: let's get physical.

Ferguson et al. (2013) use applied physics to quantitate the fitness of HIV-1 Gag based on sequence variability across the protein. This enables a new approach to vaccine design that focuses CD8+ T cell responses on fitness-constrained parts of Gag.

HIV-1 vaccines and adaptive trial designs.

Developing a vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) poses an exceptional challenge. There are no documented cases of immune-mediated clearance of HIV from an infected individual, and no known correlates of immune protection. Although nonhuman primate models of lentivirus infection have provided valuable data about HIV pathogenesis, such models do not predict HIV vaccine efficacy...

Infant feeding and HIV-1 transmission.

Anna Coutsoudis and colleagues present a potentially important piece of the puzzle concerning the transmission of HIV-1 through breast-feeding in the first few months of life. Breast-feeding poses a substantial risk of acquiring HIV-1 infection for the baby of an HIV-1-infected mother. Samples from 549 infants were tested by HIV-DNA PCR on day 1 and at ages 1 month and 3 months. Results reve...

Infant-feeding patterns and HIV-1 transmission.