Journal post from David Baker

Today's issue of Science magazine describes an exciting new approach to HIV vaccine design using Rosetta. In contrast with other viruses such as polio and influenza, inactivated HIV or HIV proteins have not worked as vaccines, and hence as you know there is currently no effective HIV vaccine. Our approach to vaccine design is to take the bits of the HIV surface protein that people make antibodies to, and using Rosetta graft them onto small stable scaffolds that can be made in large quantities and potentially could be useful as vaccines. We've shown earlier that this can be done straightforwardly with Rosetta if the bits of the HIV protein are contiguous along the sequence, but it is much harder if the antibody recognizes multiple bits close in three dimensions but far in sequence. In this paper we show how such "discontinuous" epitipes can be transferred from HIV gp120 to a simple scaffold protein. More work will be required to determine whether this or other vaccine candidates designed using this approach will be effective as HIV vaccines-let us all hope so!!