Immune mechanisms underlying delayed disease progression in HIV-1 and HIV-2 infection

In order to design an effective vaccine against HIV infection we need to know more about how the immune system can combat HIV infection in people who have controlled the virus naturally without the need for drugs. We plan to study two groups of people where there are a large number of HIV-infected subjects who have low virus levels in their blood many years after being first infected, in China and West Africa.

There remains an urgent need for an effective vaccine to prevent HIV infection. A key obstacle in vaccine design is the lack of understanding of the correlates of protective immunity against HIV infection. We propose to study potential correlates in two groups of HIV-infected subjects. The first is a plasma donor cohort in China, where infection of several hundred people appears to have occurred with a single virus strain. The second is a cohort in West Africa of HIV-2 infection, in which the majority of infected people are long-term non-progressors, but the minority who progress to disease do so in a manner identical to HIV-1 infection.