NAC

The 2008 AIDS Vaccine Blueprint

The Neutralizing Antibody Consortium

IAVI’s Neutralizing Antibody Consortium (NAC) was formed in 2002 as a pioneering effort to launch the first large-scale collaborative research effort to address a fundamental hurdle in HIV vaccine design: how to elicit antibodies that neutralize a broad range of HIV strains. This requires varied scientific disciplines working together to determine how to trigger the immune system to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs).

The NAC is led by Scientific Director Dennis Burton and IAVI Senior Vice President Wayne Koff. Members include leading HIV research labs, biotech companies and clinical research centers from around the world. To support the efforts of the NAC, IAVI and The Scripps Research Institute established in 2008 in La Jolla, Calif., the world’s first research center solely dedicated to the study of HIV-neutralizing antibodies.

The primary approach of the NAC is to tease out the structural and functional secrets of the interactions between HIV and bNAbs. These structures provide the basis for the design of HIV candidate vaccines. The goal is to design, identify and prioritize the most promising candidate vaccines for human testing. Recent advances isolating new bNAbs allow us to focus and take aim at critical, effective vaccine targets.

Several other vaccine approaches – including computational, mutational and non-structural approaches – are also used to understand the complex, dynamic nature of a functional Env trimer, as it is only in the functional state, that the trimer is susceptible to neutralization.