Simple Summary – HIV-1 Conserved Elements p24CE DNA Vaccine Induces Humoral Immune Responses with Broad Epitope Recognition in Macaques
Link to the paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4206485/
HIV viruses are difficult to treat partly due to their ability to mutate. This makes it difficult for scientists and your body to target and destroy viruses. With the advent of DNA vaccines, it gives us another way we can possibly target HIV viruses. What are DNA vaccines? DNA vaccines are a way to protect against diseases by injecting viral DNA into a cell to produce a target for the body to create antibodies against. The body will then target the specific disease. In this particular paper, they are targeting proteins in HIV that are conserved and do not mutate. This is called the conserved element or CE. They used two targets in the paper, p24CE DNA and p55gag DNA. They found that together they work the best and augment one another. They propose that this could do well against a variety of different HIV types. The study was performed on macaques and have not be proven to be effective in humans yet although studies are underway.
