Conveners
Vaccines & Immune Escape
- Alison Hill (Johns Hopkins University)
- Eric Lewitus (MHRP|HJF)
All animal models of HIV-1 are either immunocompromised or rely on the primate virus, SIV. We recently employed tools from population genetics and viral evolution to engineer a host switch of HIV-1 into fully immunocompetent Nancy Ma’s owl monkeys (Aotus nancymaae). These animals can be infected with a minimally modified form of HIV-1, where infection recapitulates key hallmarks of infection...
Broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) are an emerging HIV therapeutic approach undermined by frequent intra-host viral escape. Predicting escape pathways for different bNAbs is a crucial step in combining them into effective multi-component therapies, but identifying escape mutations from in vitro screens may not yield results that are portable across the diverse genetic backgrounds found...
Reinfections with respiratory viruses are thought to be driven by ongoing antigenic immune escape in the viral population. However, this does not explain why antigenic variation is frequently observed in respiratory viruses and not systemically replicating viruses. Here, we argue that the rapid rate of waning immunity in the respiratory tract is a key driver of antigenic evolution in...
Molecular mimicry, where pathogen proteins structurally resemble host antigens, is a central hypothesis in autoimmune pathology. However, current detection methods are largely limited to sequence homology or domain-level alignment, failing to identify the subtle, discontinuous structural "patches" that often drive antibody cross-reactivity. To resolve this computational bottleneck, we present...
