Natural mutants of HIV CTL epitopes with enhanced immunogenicity as potential vaccine candidates

摘要

HIV/AIDS remains a serious, ultimately lethal pandemic disease in much of the developing world. Significant treatment advances have been made with anti-retroviral agents, but major problems remain. These treatments are expensive and difficult to apply especially for developing world nations that lack adequate finances and infrastructure, do not eliminate all virus and therefore require life long treatment regimens, carry significant toxic side effects and in some quarters becoming less effective due to viral mutation. There remains a major need to identify effective measures to prevent new HIV infections, especially in areas of the world where it is a pandemic. Based on the history of vaccine development, it remains a strong consensus in the biomedical research community that immunization will provide the most effective and affordable long term-approach to controlling the spread of HIV/AIDS.