Furthermore, the fact that this study identified immunogenic, highly conserved A2 epitopes brings hope to the field. Other groups have made important strides in developing and evaluating vaccines that are designed to achieve broad coverage of Selleck PD 332991 HIV strains, but these vaccines are derived with a focus only on highly conserved regions of HIV consensus

with the design of a novel protein, or mosaic protein approach [82], [83] and [84]. We would predict that some of the epitopes contained within those regions would be less immunogenic than the ones described here and better quality epitopes could potentially be reverse engineered into the mosaic sequence. Recently, Perez et al. identified nine “super-type-restricted” epitopes recognized in a diverse group of HIV-1-positive subjects; however, a single-epitope vaccine or an oligo-epitope vaccine, such as one based on a handful of epitopes,

risks selection of viral escape variants and might allow re-infection with viral variants [85] and [86]. Going forward our strategy will be to continue to use a balanced approach, identifying vaccine candidate epitopes based on both high conservation and predicted immunogenicity while also validating them in vitro in more than one cohort. We believe that the insertion of multiple highly conserved T-cell epitopes, as identified here, in a single HIV vaccine construct would result in broader T-cell responses selleck kinase inhibitor that would improve the breadth of the immune response [87]. In this study, we have examined a large number of viral genomes representative of global HIV-1 sequences across an evolutionary continuum to determine the most highly conserved sequences across the entire viral proteome. Protective HLA class I alleles associated with slow virus growth select epitopes that are highly immunogenic, where escape mutations impart a substantial cost to replicative fitness. Based upon this principle we have identified epitopes that are highly conserved and likewise

have a weak selective evolutionary advantage. Furthermore, we have validated HLA-A2 class I binding and immunogenicity (i.e., proteasomal processing PDK4 and TCR recognition) of these peptides in both acute and chronically HIV-1-infected individuals. Since this was a cross-sectional study of both chronic and early infected individuals to evaluate immunogenicity, it was not possible to determine when these responses arose during the course of infection or what role they played in control of viral replication. Studies have shown that CTL responses measured within individuals differ significantly between acute and chronic infection, and early CTL responses are most predictive of disease course [25] and [88].