Escape and reversion of critical immune responses: insights into effective immunity to HIV

Funded Activity Summary

The HIV pandemic is a global emergency. The overall goal of this grant proposal is to elucidate the requirements for protective immunity to HIV. Although immune responses have some effect on HIV replication, the virus mutates and evolves to escape immune pressure. However, each mutation away from wild-type virus likely results in at least some impairment in the ability of the virus to replicate. Where efficient immune responses target regions of the virus that are critical to virus replication, escape mutations may result in viral variants incapable of causing disease. Resulting from an exciting collaboration between HIV and theoretical biologists, we have recently identified techniques to calculate the effectiveness of immunity and the cost of subsequent immune escape variants. We will use and expand these techniques to identify immune responses that result in the most effective control of viral replication. These studies will lead to ways to improve HIV vaccines and thereby prevent HIV.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2007

End Date: 01-01-2009

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $372,446.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Infectious Diseases

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

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Other Keywords

AIDS | HIV preventive vaccine | Humoral and cellular immunity | Immunology | Virology - HIV replication fitness | acquired immunodeficiency syndrome | immune protection | immunisation | immunity | viral replication

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