New HIV vaccine offers hope to AIDS patients through animal experiments

　　Through biomineralization technology, scientists have developed an enhanced vaccine that can evade pre-existing antibodies in the body, providing a new idea for vaccine optimization and transformation, including HIV vaccines. The HIV vaccine developed based on this technology has now passed animal experiments, and the relevant paper was published online on November 26 in the authoritative international journal "Advanced Materials" in materials science.

　　The research team of Tang Ruikang, a professor at Zhejiang University's Qiushi Institute for Advanced Study, Chen Ling's team, a researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Diseases at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Qin Chengfeng's team, a researcher at the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, jointly completed this study.

　　Over the past 30 years, the scientific community has conducted nearly 200 initial clinical trials of AIDS vaccines, but most of them ended in failure. Chen Ling believes that "the reasons for the failure may include multiple factors, but one of them may be due to the presence of anti-adenovirus neutralizing antibodies in most people, which can 'neutralize' the adenovirus vector used as an AIDS vaccine, rendering the vaccine ineffective." ”

　　Scientists engineered adenoviral vectors to carry HIV antigens. Co-first author Dr. Wang Xiaoyu from Qiushi Institute of Advanced Studies at Zhejiang University said: "We tried to use biomineralization method to 'dress' the vaccine with a calcium phosphate film coat to improve the performance of the vaccine. ”This approach is called viral biomimetic mineralization technology. Wang Xiaoyu said: "The 'armed' vaccine is like putting the vaccine into a 'Trojan horse'. It can effectively evade the body's defense line against the neutralizing antibodies against the adenovirus itself and successfully enter the cell castle. ”Co-first author Dr. Sun Caijun of the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health said that once the vaccine enters the cell castle, in the acidic environment of the lysosomes in the body, the vaccine quickly breaks out of the "Trojan horse" and then expresses the target antigen and triggers a series of immune responses. Without this coat, adenovirus vector vaccines are like running naked in an environment densely populated with anti-adenovirus neutralizing antibodies. Most vaccines are unable to express antigens and induce immune responses.