The goal of our lab is to develop vaccines for HIV/AIDS with a major emphasis on therapeutic vaccines. There are currently about 40 million individuals living with HIV worldwide, with 16,000 people newly infected every day. Without question the AIDS epidemic represents a major threat to public health, economic development, and cultural stability worldwide. The introduction of drugs that control virus replication and improved treatment regimens like HAART have succeeded only in prolonging the lives of some infected individuals fortunate enough to have access to the medications. These anti-viral drugs do not cure infection, and are associated with several significant problems, including serious side effects, prohibitively high cost, the need for rigorous adherence and the potential for developing viral resistance. For these reasons, development of a safe and effective HIV vaccine is imperative. Cellular immune responses are critical for the control of HIV replication. In particular, CD8 T cells play a major role in restricting the growth of virus and eliminating virus-infected cells. In the presence of antigen and inflammatory signals, cognate naïve CD8 cells expand and traffic to infection sites, where they lyse virus-infected host cells. However, CD8 T cells from HIV-infected individuals have been shown to be non-functional. Our efforts are focused on understanding the phenotypes of protective CD8 T cells and the mechanisms of their generation and maintenance. CD4 T cell help is critical for raising effective anti-viral CD8 T cells. Following viral infection, CD8 T cells generated in the absence of CD4 help do not expand and kill virus-infected cells efficiently. Individuals with AIDS loose their anti-viral helper CD4 T cells due to preferential killing of these cells by HIV. This becomes a major limitation when therapeutically vaccinating AIDS patients to generate functional CD8 T cells. To overcome this problem, we are currently developing strategies that can substitute the requirement of CD4 T cell help for generating functional CD8 T cells. These above discussed strategies will enormously improve our ability to develop effective therapeutic vaccines and vaccine regimens against HIV/AIDS.

[rama@rmy.emory.edu ]