Scaffolding to build a rational vaccine design strategy

摘要

Conventional vaccines, going back to the work of Jenner and Pas-teur, are based on a rather di-rect mimicry of the offending pathogen using an attenuated or killed version of the microbe or purified or recombinant proteins from the microbe surface. These vaccines have been enor-mously successful against a range of pathogens. However, the conventional approaches have faltered for other path-ogens, such as HIV, that have evolved an arsenal of molecular tricks to avoid im-mune responses. In such cases, alternate strategies are being investigated. The re-port by Ofek et al. (1) in PNAS describes a promising approach for presenting a vaccine target in the context of a protein or "scaffold" that lacks some of the de-fensive features of a pathogen such as HIV. The report does not deliver an HIV vaccine, but it takes an important step forward.