Lemiale F, Korokhov N. Lentiviral vectors for HIV disease prevention and treatment.

Lemiale F, Korokhov N. Lentiviral vectors for HIV disease prevention and treatment.

HIV has posed major challenges to the scientific community, both in terms of treatment and prevention. Current drug regimens, while efficacious, are expensive, inaccessible to major parts of the world, induce major side effects, and cannot prevent escape mutants due to lack of compliance and drug fatigue. In the vaccine field, recent setbacks related to the interruption and cancellation of major advanced clinical trials using adenoviral vectors have highlighted the need for new and innovative strategies. Unique features of HIV-based lentiviral vectors (LVs) and the current progress in the LV-based platform development make them an attractive alternative for the further LV-based HIV vaccine development. In preclinical studies, they have demonstrated a high degree of immunogenicity, while overcoming pitfalls faced by other viral vectors. These findings, combined with recent progress in large scale lentiviral vectors production/purification, make this strategy worth considering for further vaccine development.

Editors’ note: In making the case for further study of lentiviral vectors, this article provides a description of the evolution of HIV vaccine strategies. These aim to overcome the challenges of HIV-1 sequence diversity, latency, high rates of mutation and recombination, and infection by HIV of critical immune cells. Among the current approaches are strategies using protein-based formulations to induce neutralising antibodies and vector systems to induce cellular immunity – we will likely need both for an effective HIV vaccine.