SFI External Professor Bette Korber is featured in a Santa Fe New Mexican article about the search for an effective vaccine for HIV.
Korber, a senior researcher in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Theoretical Division, is part of an international team of investigators preparing for the first human trial of a mosaic HIV vaccine candidate. The mosaic vaccine represents a novel strategy for fighting the virus that causes AIDS by attempting to address the virus’s extensive genetic diversity.
Korber led, and SFI Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya is a member of, a team that designed the vaccine that will be used in the human study. Human trials are planned for later this year.
“We're in the evolutionary fast lane studying HIV,” said Korber in the article. “As soon as the body makes an immune response, HIV wiggles out of it.”
The new vaccine is a mosaic of many sets of protein sequences that can cue the body's immune system to respond to a variety of HIV mutations.
Read the Santa Fe New Mexican article
SFI news article about planned human trials