IAVI and Lentigen to collaborate on design of novel AIDS vaccine candidate

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and USA-based Lentigen have  announced a collaboration to design a preventive AIDS vaccine based on Lentigen's technology. The candidate AIDS vaccine will be devised to safely mimic biological aspects of HIV infection and tested first in pre-clinical studies as part of an initial 18-month agreement. Lentigen's technology relies on a synthetic version of a virus related to HIV that has been engineered, along with other safety modifications, to be incapable of inserting itself into the human genome.

Some of the most effective vaccines used in humans are live but attenuated versions of disease-causing viruses - viruses that, in other words, have been rendered incapable of causing disease. But this approach is considered too risky for HIV vaccine development. Scientists fear that attenuated HIV might mutate and become pathogenic again, or insert itself into the genome and do so later. The use of Lentigen's technology could, however, allow researchers to come remarkably close to the live-attenuated strategy without raising such concerns.

"We believe that this prototype vaccine has the potential to generate the protective immune responses seen with experimental live-attenuated viruses, but without their pathogenic effects," said Boro Dropulic, chief scientific officer and a founder of Lentigen.