Annual and Interim Progress Report Summaries
Principal Investigator: David Montefiori
Project: Comprehensive Antibody Vaccine Immune Monitoring Consortium
Submitted July 12, 2012
The CAVD Comprehensive Antibody Vaccine Immune Monitoring Consortium (CAVIMC) aims to facilitate the discovery and timely licensure of a safe, effective and practical HIV-1 vaccine by using valid laboratory criteria and Good Clinical Laboratory Practices (GCLP) to monitor antibody responses in the systemic and mucosal compartments in preclinical and clinical phases of vaccine testing. We also aim to identify correlates of protective immunity and to generate new scientific findings that will help bridge the gap between preclinical vaccine discovery and human clinical trials.
Over the last year the CAVIMC maintained and strengthened its ability to assess a wide range of antibody responses, including a special focus on the antibody correlates in the RV144 Thai trial, and the epitopes recognized by a new generation of broadly neutralizing antibodies. New technologies were developed and continue to be improved for assessments of binding antibodies, neutralizing antibodies, Fc receptor-mediated antibody effector functions (e.g., ADCC) and other functional antibody activities. We also refined our capacity to assess key epitopes. As a result, our routine assessments of vaccine-elicited antibody responses now place a greater emphasis on multiple types of antibodies. This last year also saw the completion of the entire dataset for the CAVD Neutralization Serotype Discovery Project. This project, which began in 2008 and represents the largest and most complex dataset of its kind, aims to improve our understanding of the requirements for broadly neutralizing antibody responses and how best to measure these responses. Analytical and computational analyses of the dataset are underway and promise to provide many new scientific findings as they relate to vaccine design and testing. Finally, the CAVIMC continued to be a major source of reference reagents, having distributed ~70 biological shipments of Env-pseudotyped viruses, Env.IMC.LucR viruses, positive and negative control serologic reagents, new cell lines and proteins to CAVD investigators.