Influenza and HIV vaccines and the importance of mucosal immunity

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 *

FACS plots of SIV KP9-specific CD8+ T cells in blood before and 7 days after Flu-SIV infection

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

Infection and Immunology

School Research Themes

Molecular Mechanisms of Disease



Key Contact

For further information about this research, please contact the research group leader.

Department / Centre

Microbiology and Immunology

MDHS Research library
Explore by researcher, school, project or topic.