Designing Peptide-Based HIV Vaccine for Chinese

CD4+ T cells are central to the induction and maintenance of CD8+ T cell and antibody-producing B cell responses, and the latter are essential for the protection against disease in subjects with HIV infection. How to elicit HIV-specific CD4+ T cell responses in a given population using vaccines is one of the major areas of current HIV vaccine research. To design vaccine that targets specifically Chinese, we assembled a database that is comprised of sequences from 821 Chinese HIV isolates and 46 human leukocyte antigen (HLA) DR alleles identified in Chinese population. We then predicted 20 potential HIV epitopes using bioinformatics approaches. The combination of these 20 epitopes has a theoretical coverage of 98.1% of the population for both the prevalent HIV genotypes and also Chinese HLA-DR types. We suggest that testing this vaccine experimentally will facilitate the development of a CD4+ T cell vaccine especially catered for Chinese.