Influenza and HIV vaccines and the importance of mucosal immunity
-
Professor Stephen Kent+61 3 8344 9939
Project Details
Influenza and HIV are both serious global pathogens.What can we learn abotu immunity and these two diverse viruses that helps us design better vaccines? Recent advances in reverse genetic techniques allow insertion of foreign antigens into live influenza viruses. Further, live attenuated influenza vaccines are now highly effective vaccines. Together with our collaborators we are designing recombinant influenza vaccines with inserted SIV antigens to test as a combined Influenza-AIDS vaccine. An advantage of this strategy is that as a mucosal virus, there is a strong likelihood that immunity at mucosal surfaces, where HIV is first encountered, can be induced with this approach. Exciting data suggest this approach has great potential to induce T cell immunity although escape from single CTL epitopes is a significant barrier. We have recently generated Flu-HIV vaccines that express an expanded range of HIV antigens104 * and show great promise for the induction of resident memory T cells in mice. 238 *
Figure 1: FACS plots of SIV KP9-specific CD8+ T cells in blood before and 7 days after Flu-SIV infection
We are also collaborating with Dr Charanai Ramasinghe from ANU on pox-virus based mucosal vaccine strategies. 61, 168 *
* superscript number links to a specific publication in the chronological listing on Stephen's blog
Researchers
Dr Hyon-Xhi Tan, Dr Adam Wheatley
Funding
NHMRC Project and program grant funding.
Research Group
Kent laboratory: HIV vaccines; immune responses to HIV-1; immunotherapy
Faculty Research Themes
School Research Themes
Molecular Mechanisms of Disease
Key Contact
For further information about this research, please contact the research group leader.
Department / Centre
MDHS Research library
Explore by researcher, school, project or topic.