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Train the cell
Train the cell, then deploy: Science behind the new HIV study, and why it's a foothold, not a finish line
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Train the cell, then deploy: Science behind the new HIV study, and why it's a foothold, not a finish line
After decades of failed HIV vaccines, a new approach that predicts which cells to train, not just what antigen to show, has produced antibodies.
Published on: Jul 8, 2026, 16:50:35 IST By Binayak Dasgupta Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link A study published in the journal Nature late last month has done something no HIV vaccine has managed before: triggered protective levels of HIV-fighting antibodies in monkeys with entirely ordinary and unmodified immune systems. The vaccine was developed by a consortium that included Scripps Research. (PTI/Representative) It is a narrow result — only one animal in the trial reached that protective threshold, and fewer than half showed any antibody response at all. But researchers behind the work say its significance lies less in its scale than in how it was achieved, after more than a decade of research and a long run of failed HIV vaccines before it. The vaccine was developed by a consortium that included Scripps Research, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative's Neutralizing Antibody Center, along with Fred Hutch, Emory’s primate and vaccine centres, the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California, San Diego. It is the product of 14 years of collaboration between LJI and Scripps Research, under the Scripps Consortium for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development. “This feels like a huge success. We constructed a successful vaccine from the ground up, which required a deep understanding of the immune system,” Shane Crotty, chief scientific officer at LJI, who co-led the research with Scripps Research’s William Schief, said in a statement. Also read: Billions of doses later, a Lancet review confirms mRNA vaccine safetyWhy an HIV vaccine has been so hard to make
HIV resists vaccination for three reasons, all rooted in how the virus behaves once it is inside the body. It disguises itself in a coat of sugar molecules, called glycans, that also cover human cells, letting it move largely undetected past the immune system. It also mutates at an extraordinary rate. “The worldwide diversity of HIV mutations is extraordinary. Even the diversity within one individual person living with HIV is dramatic,” said Patrick Madden, an LJI instructor and the study’s co-first author alongside Scripps Research investigator Jon Steichen. And it changes shape once it has infected a cell, often outrunning whatever immune response it triggered on the way in. Those three obstacles have defeated nearly every HIV vaccine to reach large-scale human testing. RV144, tested in Thailand and reporting results in 2009, remains the only vaccine regimen ever shown to reduce infection risk in a human trial — 31% efficacy at three-and-a-half years, a result too weak to bring to market. A vaccine developed by Merck, tested in a trial known as STEP, was halted in 2007 after monitors found evidence it was raising infection risk in some vaccinated men rather than lowering it. A redesigned version of the Thai regimen, tested in South Africa a decade later as HVTN 702, showed no protective effect at all. Two further vaccines, built from mixed fragments of several HIV strains and tested as Imbokodo and Mosaico, were both stopped for lack of effect, in 2021 and 2023, respectively. None of those vaccines used the strategy behind this new result. Germline targeting has never been tested at that scale, and researchers are careful to note it has not failed alongside the others — it simply has not been tried at that level yet. Also read: Why latest alcohol study is hard to swallowThe three-stage regimen: prime, boost, polish
Most vaccines work by presenting the immune system with a piece of a virus and hoping that, among the countless responses a body could mount, a useful one turns up. Germline targeting reverses that logic. Antibodies are produced by immune cells called B cells, which begin in an early “naive” state before maturing into effective antibody producers. Rather than presenting an antigen and hoping, germline targeting starts from the antibody the vaccine wants the body to produce, finds the rare cells already capable of becoming it, and trains them there directly. Think of it as recruiting a person who can already do the job, rather than advertising the vacancy and hoping the right applicant shows up. That recruitment happens in three distinct stages, each playing a different role. The priming shot is designed to find and activate an extraordinarily rare class of naive B cell — one that already carries the specific genetic starting material needed to eventually produce a broadly neutralising antibody. Most naive B cells do not have this raw material. The priming immunogen is built to recognise and switch on the ones that do. In this study, researchers engineered that priming immunogen to resemble a specific site on HIV’s outer “envelope” protein — a target known as BG18 — and then tested the regimen in rhesus macaques. The boosters that follow do not repeat the priming shot. Each is engineered to reintroduce more of the features of the real, native virus than the one before it, exposing the newly activated B cells to increasingly complex, true-to-life versions of HIV’s structure. In effect, it allows for the kind of viral diversity that has undone most vaccines built around a single, unchanging antigen. The final “polishing” stage is where the regimen tries to close the gap between an antibody that merely recognises HIV and one that can neutralise it, refining the antibody’s structure until it can bind and disable a broad range of real HIV strains, not just the version of the virus it was shown during priming and boosting. “This series of vaccinations will guide, or ‘walk’, a B cell from its naive state to its broadly neutralising state,” Madden said, according to the LJI statement. Researchers described the overall process, more informally, as a kind of training programme: a rare cell is found, then walked through a structured sequence designed to leave it capable of doing something only a small number of cells, in a small number of people, can normally do on their own. It is this deliberate design that researchers say makes even a modest result significant, against a field where most vaccines have worked by trial and error, and mostly failed. Also read: India's next pharmaceutical revolutionReading the results correctly
The study reported two separate figures, measuring two different things. In more than half the animals, the right B cells matured along the intended path, with neutralisation strength reaching up to 67% of a reference antibody’s potency — evidence the vaccine was doing its job at a cellular level. On a narrower and harder measure — actual neutralising antibody circulating in the blood — the response rate was 44%. It was only within that smaller group that the single best-performing animal reached antibody levels the study’s authors described as expected to confer protection. Even that finding comes with an important caveat: the vaccinated animals were not exposed to HIV afterwards, so the study does not show that the antibodies actually prevent infection — only that, in one animal, they reached the protection threshold. “It was incredible to get those results, but of course we'd like to see a response in 100% of the animals,” Madden said.The road ahead
Part of this vaccine’s target has already been tested in humans. A US trial called HVTN 144 evaluated whether a priming immunogen alone could activate the right precursor B cells for the BG18 antibody class in people — and it could. A follow-on trial, IAVI G004, began in December 2025 and is now testing the next stage, using an mRNA delivery platform built by Moderna, where Schief, one of the study’s senior authors, is now based. The full three-stage regimen used on the monkeys has not yet been tested in humans at all. IAVI, Scripps Research and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network said they are advancing plans to do so. Researchers caution that even a clean result in that future trial would show only that the vaccine can produce the right antibodies in a person, not that those antibodies protect against HIV. That would require a much larger efficacy trial, run at the scale of RV144 or the vaccines that failed after it, a stage germline targeting has not come close to reaching. Also read: Scientists take another step towards lab-made lifeWhat this could mean for medical progress
Nature published a related finding on a different HIV antibody target in April 2026 from a separate research group, and a second study on the same antibody target as this one, from yet another group, on the day this paper appeared. Three papers, from at least two other laboratories, converged on the broad strategy within a two-month window. Researchers say that pattern suggests that several groups are approaching similar milestones, rather than an isolated breakthrough. IAVI, the study’s co-developer, has said the implications may extend beyond HIV. If vaccine design can reliably steer antibody development toward a predetermined target, the same approach could eventually inform vaccine efforts against other viruses that mutate quickly and evade the immune system. That prospect, like the vaccine itself, remains unproven so far. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Binayak Dasgupta Binayak reports on information security, privacy and scientific research in health and environment with explanatory pieces. He also edits the news sections of the newspaper. Vaccine Hiv Science Get the latest headlines from US news and global updates from Pakistan, Nepal, UK, Bangladesh, Russia and US Iran war Live, get all the latest headlines in one place on Hindustan Times. Home/World News/Train The Cell, Then Deploy: Science Behind The New HIV Study, And Why It's A Foothold, Not A Finish Line See LessA study published in the journal Nature late last month has done something no HIV vaccine has managed before: triggered protective levels of HIV-fighting antibodies in monkeys with entirely ordinary and unmodified immune systems.
It is a narrow result — only one animal in the trial reached that protective threshold, and fewer than half showed any antibody response at all. But researchers behind the work say its significance lies less in its scale than in how it was achieved, after more than a decade of research and a long run of failed HIV vaccines before it.
The vaccine was developed by a consortium that included Scripps Research, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative's Neutralizing Antibody Center, along with Fred Hutch, Emory’s primate and vaccine centres, the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California, San Diego. It is the product of 14 years of collaboration between LJI and Scripps Research, under the Scripps Consortium for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development.
“This feels like a huge success. We constructed a successful vaccine from the ground up, which required a deep understanding of the immune system,” Shane Crotty, chief scientific officer at LJI, who co-led the research with Scripps Research’s William Schief, said in a statement.
Also read: Billions of doses later, a Lancet review confirms mRNA vaccine safety
It also mutates at an extraordinary rate. “The worldwide diversity of HIV mutations is extraordinary. Even the diversity within one individual person living with HIV is dramatic,” said Patrick Madden, an LJI instructor and the study’s co-first author alongside Scripps Research investigator Jon Steichen.
And it changes shape once it has infected a cell, often outrunning whatever immune response it triggered on the way in.
Those three obstacles have defeated nearly every HIV vaccine to reach large-scale human testing. RV144, tested in Thailand and reporting results in 2009, remains the only vaccine regimen ever shown to reduce infection risk in a human trial — 31% efficacy at three-and-a-half years, a result too weak to bring to market.
A vaccine developed by Merck, tested in a trial known as STEP, was halted in 2007 after monitors found evidence it was raising infection risk in some vaccinated men rather than lowering it.
A redesigned version of the Thai regimen, tested in South Africa a decade later as HVTN 702, showed no protective effect at all.
Two further vaccines, built from mixed fragments of several HIV strains and tested as Imbokodo and Mosaico, were both stopped for lack of effect, in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
None of those vaccines used the strategy behind this new result. Germline targeting has never been tested at that scale, and researchers are careful to note it has not failed alongside the others — it simply has not been tried at that level yet.
Also read: Why latest alcohol study is hard to swallow
Rather than presenting an antigen and hoping, germline targeting starts from the antibody the vaccine wants the body to produce, finds the rare cells already capable of becoming it, and trains them there directly. Think of it as recruiting a person who can already do the job, rather than advertising the vacancy and hoping the right applicant shows up.
That recruitment happens in three distinct stages, each playing a different role.
The priming shot is designed to find and activate an extraordinarily rare class of naive B cell — one that already carries the specific genetic starting material needed to eventually produce a broadly neutralising antibody. Most naive B cells do not have this raw material. The priming immunogen is built to recognise and switch on the ones that do.
In this study, researchers engineered that priming immunogen to resemble a specific site on HIV’s outer “envelope” protein — a target known as BG18 — and then tested the regimen in rhesus macaques.
The boosters that follow do not repeat the priming shot. Each is engineered to reintroduce more of the features of the real, native virus than the one before it, exposing the newly activated B cells to increasingly complex, true-to-life versions of HIV’s structure. In effect, it allows for the kind of viral diversity that has undone most vaccines built around a single, unchanging antigen.
The final “polishing” stage is where the regimen tries to close the gap between an antibody that merely recognises HIV and one that can neutralise it, refining the antibody’s structure until it can bind and disable a broad range of real HIV strains, not just the version of the virus it was shown during priming and boosting.
“This series of vaccinations will guide, or ‘walk’, a B cell from its naive state to its broadly neutralising state,” Madden said, according to the LJI statement.
Researchers described the overall process, more informally, as a kind of training programme: a rare cell is found, then walked through a structured sequence designed to leave it capable of doing something only a small number of cells, in a small number of people, can normally do on their own.
It is this deliberate design that researchers say makes even a modest result significant, against a field where most vaccines have worked by trial and error, and mostly failed.
Also read: India's next pharmaceutical revolution
On a narrower and harder measure — actual neutralising antibody circulating in the blood — the response rate was 44%. It was only within that smaller group that the single best-performing animal reached antibody levels the study’s authors described as expected to confer protection.
Even that finding comes with an important caveat: the vaccinated animals were not exposed to HIV afterwards, so the study does not show that the antibodies actually prevent infection — only that, in one animal, they reached the protection threshold. “It was incredible to get those results, but of course we'd like to see a response in 100% of the animals,” Madden said.
A US trial called HVTN 144 evaluated whether a priming immunogen alone could activate the right precursor B cells for the BG18 antibody class in people — and it could. A follow-on trial, IAVI G004, began in December 2025 and is now testing the next stage, using an mRNA delivery platform built by Moderna, where Schief, one of the study’s senior authors, is now based. The full three-stage regimen used on the monkeys has not yet been tested in humans at all. IAVI, Scripps Research and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network said they are advancing plans to do so.
Researchers caution that even a clean result in that future trial would show only that the vaccine can produce the right antibodies in a person, not that those antibodies protect against HIV. That would require a much larger efficacy trial, run at the scale of RV144 or the vaccines that failed after it, a stage germline targeting has not come close to reaching.
Also read: Scientists take another step towards lab-made life
Researchers say that pattern suggests that several groups are approaching similar milestones, rather than an isolated breakthrough.
IAVI, the study’s co-developer, has said the implications may extend beyond HIV. If vaccine design can reliably steer antibody development toward a predetermined target, the same approach could eventually inform vaccine efforts against other viruses that mutate quickly and evade the immune system. That prospect, like the vaccine itself, remains unproven so far.
Source: HindustanTimes
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