Many vaccines work by introducing a protein to the body that resembles part of a virus. Ideally, the immune system will produce long-lasting antibodies recognizing that specific virus, thereby providing protection.
But Scripps Research scientists have now discovered that for some HIV vaccines, something else happens: after a few immunizations the immune system begins to produce antibodies against immune complexes already bound to the viral protein alone. They don’t yet know whether this chain reaction, described in Science Immunology, hurts or helps the immune system’s ability to fight HIV, but say that understanding it better could lead to improvements in HIV vaccines. The research was published in the journal on January 17, 2025.
These anti-immune complex antibodies have not been studied in very much depth, especially in the context of HIV vaccination. Understanding these responses could lead to smarter vaccine designs and Immunotherapeutics. It’s an exciting step forward in fine-tuning antibody and vaccine-based strategies against HIV and other diseases.”
Andrew Ward, PhD, professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research and senior author of the new paper
The new observation came about when Ward’s team was using advanced imaging tools to study how antibodies evolve after multiple HIV vaccine doses. A technique invented by the lab, known as Electron Microscopy-Based Polyclonal Epitope Mapping (EMPEM), lets the researchers see exactly where on the HIV virus antibodies bind. When they carried out the experiments on blood from animals that had received multiple doses of an experimental HIV