The Neutralizing Antibody Consortium
Launched in 2002, the Neutralizing Antibody Consortium (NAC) is a collaborative effort involving leading HIV research labs, biotech companies and clinical research centers from around the world to address one of the fundamental hurdles in HIV vaccine design: the elicitation of antibodies capable of neutralizing a wide variety of HIV strains.
The primary goal of the NAC is to tease out the structural and functional secrets of the interactions between HIV and such broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs), and to apply that information systematically to design and assess prototype AIDS vaccines.
To support the efforts of the NAC, IAVI and The Scripps Research Institute established in 2008, in La Jolla, California, the world’s first research center solely dedicated to the study of HIV-neutralizing antibodies.
Though the NAC hasn’t yet created a novel AIDS vaccine, it has already passed many milestones on the path to that goal.
These include:
- Capturing, in atomic detail, the structures of several bnAbs attached to their target molecules on HIV, and exposing how each targets HIV’s few vulnerabilities
- Launching a global project to discover new bnAbs. The effort, which involves the IAVI R&D team and several collaborating clinics and research centers around the world, looks for bnAbs in HIV-positive people who have remained healthy for at least 3 years. It has led to the isolation of several promising antibodies
- Beginning to design and generate prototype vaccines that might elicit bnAbs. This task is, as expected, easier conceived than accomplished
- Establishment of industrial high through-put screening capabilities to enable rapid screening and prioritization of prototype vaccine candidates
Members of the NAC are supported by an industrial-style project management group that ensures coordination of scientific efforts and the use of common reagents, scientific methods and assays to ensure that the data generated by different laboratories are always comparable.