Neutralizing antibodies and antigens in AIDS

Until recently, much of the effort put into development of an AIDS vaccine has focussed on the elicitation of a neutralizing antibody response. The viral target of neutralization, HIV envelope glycoprotein, has been produced in bulk through recombinant techniques, but has had little success as a vaccine. The specific epitopes to which neutralizing antibodies bind have been mapped, and although the major epitope is hypervariable, others are conserved. This allows the design of second generation vaccines. Meanwhile, vaccine studies in the SIV animal model simply using inactivated virus as immunogen have demonstrated that an effective vaccine is at least possible. A variety of HIV vaccine preparations are now under investigation and the outlook for the future is promising.