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LAC


The Live Attenuated Consortium

 

The paucity of information about the types of immune responses that need to be induced to prevent HIV infection remains a major obstacle in AIDS vaccine development. Ideally, researchers would study the immune response of someone who has cleared an HIV infection. But since scientists have yet to identify anyone who fits that bill, they have had to take an indirect approach to solving the problem.

The Live Attenuated Consortium (LAC), a global consortium launched by IAVI in 2007, approaches this issue by studying the immunology of non-human primates that have been effectively immunized with weakened simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a close relative of HIV. In animal studies, such "live attenuated vaccines" have been shown to be the most effective vaccine strategy for preventing SIV infection. (For safety reasons, human AIDS vaccines cannot be made this way.)

Researchers in the LAC, particularly those at the AIDS Vaccine Design and Development Laboratory in New York City, develop and run novel assays for assessing various elements of the immune response to SIV in immunized non-human primates to identify which of those elements is crucial to combatting the virus. IAVI and its partners expect that knowledge of these immune correlates of protection will provide researchers with vital clues to design promising AIDS vaccine candidates.

The LAC has made progress on many fronts. It has:

  • Conducted the first statistically significant study in non-human primates demonstrating the efficacy of live attenuated SIV vaccine against homologous challenge (vaccine and challenge virus are matched) and heterologous challenge (in which the vaccine and challenge virus are not matched)
  • Conducted preliminary non-human primate studies to determine the type, magnitude, breadth and anatomical location of vaccine-induced immune responses to SIV 
  • Elucidated some of the key events of early SIV infection 
  • Helped to establish the importance of quickly blocking SIV at its point of entry in averting infection 
  • Standardized study design, materials, reagents and data systems across participating non-human primate labs to ensure the comparability of their data