Breaking the Barrier to an HIV Vaccine

PROJECT SUMMARY HIV remains the most consequential zoonosis of the last century, with 36 million fatalities and another 37 million infected. Even today, almost 2,000 people per day die of HIV/AIDS globally. Medications are reducing the effects of HIV on the human body and transmission of the virus to others. However, 40 years into the pandemic, there are no vaccines. Effective HIV vaccines remain our only hope of ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic once and for all. HIV vaccines are mostly developed in macaque monkeys, although this primate model of HIV infection has many limitations. Here, we explore a new animal model for HIV infection that recapitulates all key milestones in HIV acute infection and in the establishment of the latent viral reservoir. We develop the tools necessary to turn this into the long-sought model for HIV vaccine development. This new animal model will provide the perfect system to study the immune correlates of protection, the breadth of cross-protection against different HIV-1 subtypes, and to test and develop vaccine candidates.