Affiliations: [a] Duke Human Vaccine Institute, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham NC 27710, USA | [b] Department of Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham NC 27710, USA | [c] Department of Pediatrics, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham NC 27710, USA | [d] Department of Immunology, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham NC 27710, USA | New York University School of Medicine, c/o Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 423 East, 23rd Street, Room 18124N New York, NY 10010, USA
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Barton F. Haynes, MD, Director, Duke Human Vaccine Institute, Box 3258 – Duke University, RP1 Circuit Drive, Room 107, Durham, NC 27710, USA. Tel.: +1 919 684 5384; Fax: +1 919 684 55230; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: HIV-1 has evolved many ways to evade protective host immune responses, thus creating a number of problems for HIV vaccine developers. In particular, durable, broadly specific neutralizing antibodies to HIV-1 have proved difficult to induce with current HIV-1 vaccine candidates. The recent observation that some broadly neutralizing anti-HIV-1 envelope monoclonal antibodies have polyspecific reactivities to host antigens have raised the hypothesis that one reason antibodies against some of the conserved HIV-1 envelope trimer neutralizing epitopes are not routinely made may be down-regulation of some specificities of anti-HIV-1 antibody producing B cells by host B cell tolerance mechanisms.
