It is likely that a successful vaccine against HIV will need to stimulate the innate immune system, generate high levels of neutralising antibody, strong cellular immune responses, and mucosal immunity. Early efforts to develop HIV vaccines attempted to use the virus glycoprotein, gp120, to induce neutralising antibody, but did not take into account the trimeric structure of the native glycopro...

Vaccines are arguably the most powerful medical intervention in the fight against infectious diseases. The enormity of the global human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) pandemic makes the development of an AIDS vaccine a scientific and humanitarian priority. Research on vaccines that induce T-cell immunity has dominated much of the recent development...

A brief historical overview of anti-HIV vaccine approaches The identification of the human immunodeficiency virus as the causative agent of AIDS [1–4] was followed by intensive efforts to develop a vaccine against this pathogen. Initial vaccine approaches aimed at the elicitation of anti-viral neutralizing antibodies (NAbs). The sole target of anti-HIV NAbs is the viral envelope glycoprotein (E...

The unprecedented challenges of developing effective vaccines against intracellular pathogens such as HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis have resulted in more rational approaches to vaccine development. Apart from the recent advances in the design and selection of improved epitopes and adjuvants, there are also ongoing efforts to optimize delivery platforms. Viral vectors are the best-characterized...

PURPOSE We reported previously the first randomized study of any kind in patients with nonmetastatic, castrate-resistant prostate cancer. The study employed vaccine, the hormone nilutamide, and the combined therapy (crossover for each arm) with an endpoint of time to progression. We now report survival analyses at 6.5 years from the initiation of therapy with a median potential follow-up of 4.4...

We have shown that glycosylation of influenza A virus (IAV) hemagglutinin (HA), especially at position N-27, is crucial for HA folding and virus survival. However, it is not known whether the glycosylation of HA and the other two major IAV surface glycoproteins, neuraminidase (NA) and M2 ion channel, is essential for the replication of IAV. Here, we show that glycosylation of HA at N-142 modula...

Knowledge of the atomic resolution structures of viruses can be a powerful tool for vaccine discovery and design. X-ray crystallography has long served as an invaluable method for virus structure determination at high resolution, but over the past decade, cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) has begun to emerge as a complementary method that can also provide this kind of information. Crystallograp...

After 200 years of practice, vaccinology has proved to be very effective in preventing infectious diseases. However, several human and animal pathogens exist for which vaccines have not yet been discovered. As for other fields of medical sciences, it is expected that vaccinology will greatly benefit from the emerging genomics technologies such as bioinformatics, proteomics and DNA microarrays. ...

In the second half of the twentieth century dengue spread throughout the tropics, threatening the health of a third of the world's population. Dengue viruses cause 50-100 million cases of acute febrile disease every year, including more than 500,000 reported cases of the severe forms of the disease--dengue haemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. Attempts to create conventional vaccines ha...

Vaccination is generally considered to be the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases. All vaccinations work by presenting a foreign antigen to the immune system in order to evoke an immune response. The active agent of a vaccine may be intact but inactivated ('attenuated') forms of the causative pathogens (bacteria or viruses), or purified components of the pathogen that have b...