Polyvalent vaccine

Abstract

The present invention relates, in general, to an immunogenic composition (e.g., a vaccine) and, in particular, to a polyvalent immunogenic composition, such as a polyvalent HIV vaccine, and to methods of using same. The invention further relates to methods that use a genetic algorithm to create sets of polyvalent antigens suitable for use, for example, in vaccination strategies.

Description

[0001]This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 11 / 990,222, filed Apr. 20, 2009, which is the U.S. national phase International Application No. PCT / US2006 / 032907, filed Aug. 23, 2006, which designated the U.S. and claims priority from U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 710,154, filed Aug. 23, 2005, and U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 739,413, filed Nov. 25, 2005, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.[0002]This invention was made with Government support under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The Government has certain rights in the invention.[0003]The content of the ASCII text file submitted with this application on Dec. 3, 2010 named Sequence_Listing.txt created Dec. 3, 2010, which is 870 KB, is also incorporated herein by reference.[0004]The Sequence Listing filed Apr. 20, 2009 in U.S. application Ser. No. 11 / 990,222 is incorporated herein by reference.TECHNICAL FIELD[0005]The present in...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0013]Objects and advantages of the present invention will be clear from the description that follows.

Problems solved by technology

Designing an effective HIV vaccine is a many-faceted challenge.

T-cell-directed vaccine components, in contrast, can target the more conserved proteins, but even the most conserved HIV-1 proteins are diverse enough that variation is an issue.

Artificial central-sequence vaccine approaches (e.g., consensus sequences, in which every amino acid is found in a plurality of sequences, or maximum likelihood reconstructions of ancestral sequences (Gaschen et al, Science 296:2354-60 (2002), Gao et al, J. Virol. 79:1154-63 (2005), Doria-Rose et al, J. Virol. 79:11214-24 (2005), Weaver et al, J. Virol., in press)) are promising; nevertheless, even centralized strains provide limited coverage of HIV-1 variants, and consensus-based reagents fail to detect many autologous T-cell responses (Altfeld et al, J. Virol. 77:7330-40 (2003)).

Single amino acid changes can allow an epitope to escape T-cell surveillance; since many T-cell epitopes differ between HIV-1 strains at one or more positions, potential responses to any single vaccine antigen are limited.

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