Studying HIV-1 env diversity and selection of suitable immunogens across India and Africa for informing HIV-1 prevention strategies
Objectives:
To establish capacities by standardizing the protocols as well as establishing and optimizing the workflows and pipelines for the determination of eOD-GT8-specific (immunogen) VRC01-class naïve precursor frequencies in 2-3 healthy Indian donors. To optimize protocols and workflows for bulk sequencing to investigate global antibody genes allelic diversity using these set of samplesAbstract:
HIV/AIDS continues to be a major public health issue with 580 lakh individuals newly infected with HIV in 2022 in India. Therefore, more effective solutions for prevention and treatment of HIV are urgently needed. One of the promising solutions is development of anti-HIV antibody (broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs)) that can neutralize different strains of this highly variable virus. Despite, the fact that these bnAbs naturally develop in only ~5-10% of HIV-1 infected individuals over a substantial period of time, initial data from HIV research globally has shown that bnAbs can be potentially generated in HIV non-infected individuals by using specifically designed vaccines informed from the knowledge of bNAbs. These vaccines work by priming the appropriate anti-HIV antibody producing immune cells and then guiding them to produce specific broad and potent antibodies using sequential antigen substances. Therefore, this research is being conducted to help develop HIV vaccines specifically, to select specific vaccine candidates which will be more effective in preventing HIV in Indian population.
