A new €23 (million £17 million) initiative to accelerate the search for an effective HIV vaccine has begun and includes research funding for Professor Quentin Sattentau at The Dunn School.
Financed by the European Commission, the European AIDS Vaccine Initiative(EAVI2020) brings together leading HIV researchers from public organisations and biotech companies from across Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA in a focused effort to develop protective and therapeutic HIV vaccines.
At Oxford, researchers will be looking at raising two specific types of immunity to HIV infection – T cells and antibodies. If successful, both the T cell and antibody strategies could offer a universal HIV vaccine for use worldwide.
Quentin’s lab will be designing and testing novel types of protein vaccines based on the HIV envelope glycoprotein, the target of protective antibody responses. He said: ‘We aim to engineer proteins that trigger the immune system to make antibodies that recognise and inactivate most or all viral species circulating in the global pandemic, so that vaccinated individuals will be broadly protected from infection.’
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website