Safety and immunogenicity of cytotoxic T-lymphocyte poly-epitope, DNA plasmid (EP HIV-1090) vaccine in healthy, human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-uninfected adults

Full-Length HIV-1 Immunogens Induce Greater Magnitude and Comparable Breadth of T Lymphocyte Responses to Conserved HIV-1 Regions Compared with Conserved-Region-Only HIV-1 Immunogens in Rhesus Monkeys

“…Several HIV-1 vaccine immunogens have been designed to induce cellular immune responses against conserved and/or immunodominant epitopes, including the polyepitope immunogens HIVA (7) and EP HIV-1090 (28), although these immunogens proved poorly immunogenic in clinical trials (5,6,9). These data suggest that polyepitope immunogens may not have been optimally processed for or presented to the immune system (10).…”

“…DNA-and viral vector-based vaccines expressing strings of linked HIV-1 epitopes that included highly conserved sequences showed early promise in preclinical studies (7,27,28), but these vaccines proved poorly immunogenic in phase 1 clinical trials (5,6,9). An alternative strategy to improve the induction of responses against highly conserved regions is based on concatenating longer conserved stretches of proteins that would capture the most conserved epitopes but that would also provide some local protein context, thus improving the chances of biologically appropriate epitope processing (7,17,21,29).…”

T-Cell Vaccine Strategies for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the Virus with a Thousand Faces

“…Despite encouraging preliminary results, the vaccine showed disappointing immunogenicity in human studies. Only 1 of 42 uninfected vaccinated adults made a detectable gamma interferon ELISpot response to the vaccine, and 3 had a response that could be detected by a chromium release CD8 ϩ T-cell assay (39).…”

In silicodesign of a DNA-based HIV-1 multi-epitope vaccine for Chinese populations

“…Some of these candidates have been used in clinical trials and showed promise in the control of HIV-1 infection. [24][25][26][27][28][29] However, these vaccine designs did not consider the characteristics of HIV-1 prevalent in China, HLA polymorphisms in the Chinese population, or the effect of linkers between epitopes on immunogenicity. HIV-1 prevalence and HLA alleles are different in different countries and regions.…”