IntroductionAn effective prophylactic vaccine against HIV will need to elicit antibody responses capable of recognizing and neutralizing rapidly evolving antigenic regions. The immunologic milieu associated with development of neutralizing antibody breadth remains to be fully defined. In this study, we sought to identify immunological signatures associated with neutralization breadth in HIV controllers. We applied an immune monitoring approach to analyze markers of T cell and myeloid cell activation by flow cytometry, comparing broad neutralizers with low‐ and non‐neutralizers using multivariate and univariate analyses.MethodsAntibody neutralization breadth was determined, and cryopreserved peripheral blood mononuclear cells were stained for T cell and myeloid cell activation markers. Subjects were grouped according to neutralization breadth, and T cell and myeloid cell activation was analyzed by partial least squares discriminant analysis to determine immune signatures associated with high neutralization breadth.ResultsWe show that neutralization breadth in HIV viraemic controllers (VC) was strongly associated with increased frequencies of CD8+CD57+ T cells and that this association was independent of viral load, CD4 count and time since HIV diagnosis.ConclusionsOur data show elevated frequencies of CD8+CD57+ T cells in VC who develop neutralization breadth against HIV. This immune signature could serve as a potential biomarker of neutralization breadth and should be further investigated in other HIV‐positive cohorts and in HIV vaccine trials.
AbstractIntroduction: The science presented at the 21st International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, in July 2016, addressed the state of the field across basic, clinical, prevention, law and policy and implementation science.Methods and Results: The AIDS response has seen remarkable achievements in scientific advances, in translation of those advances into prevention, treatment and care for affected individuals and communities, and in large scale implementation – reaching 18 million people with antiviral therapy by mid‐year 2016. Yet incident HIV infections in adults remain stubbornly stable and are increasing in some regions and among adolescents and adults in some key populations, challenging current science, policy and programming. There have been important advances in both preventive vaccines and in cure research, but both areas require ongoing investment and innovation. Clinical research has flourished with new agents, regimens, delivery modes and diagnostics but has been challenged by aging and increasingly complex patient populations, long‐term adherence challenges, co‐infections and co‐morbidities, and unresolved issues in TB management and epidemic control. It is an extraordinary period of innovation in prevention, yet the promise of new tools and combination approaches have yet to deliver epidemic HIV control.Conclusions: Proven interventions, most notably pre‐exposure prophylaxis, PrEP, have been limited in rollout and impact. Treatment as prevention has the promise to improve clinical outcomes but remains uncertain as a prevention tool to reduce population‐level HIV incidence. The improvement of legal, policy and human rights environments for those most at risk for HIV acquisition and most at risk for lack of access to essential services; sexual and gender minorities, sex workers of all genders, people who inject drugs, and prisoners and detainees remain among the greatest unmet needs in HIV/AIDS. Failure to do better for these individuals and communities could undermine the HIV response.
With the advent and stunning success of combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) to prolong and improve quality of life for persons with HIV infection, HIV research has been afforded the opportunity to pivot towards studies aimed at finding "a cure." The mere idea that cure of HIV might be possible has energized researchers and the community towards achieving this goal. Funding agencies, both governmental and private, have targeted HIV cure as a high priority; many in the field have responded to these initiatives and the cure research agenda is robust. In this "salon" two editors of Pathogens and Immunity, Michael Lederman and Daniel Douek ask whether curing HIV is a realistic, scalable objective. We start with an overview perspective and have asked a number of prominent HIV researchers to add to the discussion.
With the advent and stunning success of combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) to prolong and improve quality of life for persons with HIV infection, HIV research has been afforded the opportunity to pivot towards studies aimed at finding "a cure." The mere idea that cure of HIV might be possible has energized researchers and the community towards achieving this goal. Funding agencies, both governmental and private, have targeted HIV cure as a high priority; many in the field have responded to these initiatives and the cure research agenda is robust. In this "salon" two editors of Pathogens and Immunity, Michael Lederman and Daniel Douek ask whether curing HIV is a realistic, scalable objective. We start with an overview perspective and have asked a number of prominent HIV researchers to add to the discussion.
With the advent and stunning success of combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) to prolong and improve quality of life for persons with HIV infection, HIV research has been afforded the opportunity to pivot towards studies aimed at finding "a cure." The mere idea that cure of HIV might be possible has energized researchers and the community towards achieving this goal. Funding agencies, both governmental and private, have targeted HIV cure as a high priority; many in the field have responded to these initiatives and the cure research agenda is robust.
Background. Previous genetic association studies of human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) progression have focused on common human genetic variation ascertained through genome-wide genotyping. Methods. We sought to systematically assess the full spectrum of functional variation in protein coding gene regions on HIV-1 progression through exome sequencing of 1327 individuals. Genetic variants were tested individually and in aggregate across genes and gene sets for an influence on HIV-1 viral load. Results. Multiple single variants within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region were observed to be strongly associated with HIV-1 outcome, consistent with the known impact of classical HLA alleles. However, no single variant or gene located outside of the MHC region was significantly associated with HIV progression. Set-based association testing focusing on genes identified as being essential for HIV replication in genome-wide small interfering RNA (siRNA) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) studies did not reveal any novel associations. Conclusions. These results suggest that exonic variants with large effect sizes are unlikely to have a major contribution to host control of HIV infection. ; This study has been financed in part within the framework of the Swiss HIV Cohort Study (www.shcs.ch) project #651 and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (www.snf.ch) grant #148522 (J.F.). The International HIV Controllers Study was made possible through a generous donation from the Mark and Lisa Schwartz Foundation and a subsequent award from the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (www.cavd.org). This work was also supported in part by the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research (cfar.globalhealth.harvard.edu) grant P-30-AI060354; University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Center for AIDS Research (cfar.ucsf.edu) grant P-30 AI27763; UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (https://ctsi.ucsf.edu) grant UL1 RR024131; Center for AIDS Research Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (http://cfar.globalhealth.harvard.edu) grant R24 AI067039; and the National Institutes for Health (www.nih.gov) grants AI28568 and AI030914 (B.D.W.). The AIDS Clinical Trials Group was supported by NIH grants AI069513, AI34835, AI069432, AI069423, AI069477, AI069501, AI069474, AI069428, AI69467, AI069415, Al32782, AI27661, AI25859, AI28568, AI30914, AI069495, AI069471, AI069532, AI069452, AI069450, AI069556, AI069484, AI069472, AI34853, AI069465, AI069511, AI38844, AI069424, AI069434, AI46370, AI68634, AI069502, AI069419, AI068636, RR024975, AI077505, AI110527, and TR000445 (D.W.H.). For the CASCADE Consortium, the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under EuroCoord (www.eurocoord.net) grant agreement no. 260694 (K.P.) and the Spanish Network of HIV/AIDS grant nos. RD06/006, RD12/0017/0018 and RD16CIII/0002/0006 (J.DA.). A portion of the data in this manuscript were collected by the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS). MACS (Principal Investigators): Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (Joseph Margolick, Todd Brown), U01-AI35042; Northwestern University (Steven Wolinsky), U01-AI35039; University of California, Los Angeles (Roger Detels, Oto Martinez-Maza, Otto Yang), U01-AI35040; University of Pittsburgh (Charles Rinaldo, Lawrence A. Kingsley, Jeremy J. Martinson), U01-AI35041; the Center for Analysis and Management of MACS, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (Lisa Jacobson, Gypsyamber D'Souza), UM1-AI35043. The MACS is funded primarily by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with additional co-funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Targeted supplemental funding for specific projects was also provided by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), and the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD). MACS data collection is also supported by UL1-TR001079 (JHU ICTR) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Johns Hopkins ICTR, or NCATS. The MACS website is located at http://aidscohortstudy.org/ ; Sí
