Design and immunogenicity assessment of HIV-1 virus-like particles as a candidate vaccine

Zhang, XiZhen; Wang, XiaoDan; Zhao, DongHai; Meng, XiangYu; Zhao, XingHong; Yu, XiangHui; Kong, Wei

To overcome the above disadvantages, we first cotransfected two plasmids, and used neomycin as stable screen marker. We then screened mammalian cell lines that could express the gagpol and env proteins with high efficiency. The gag protein readily packs into non-enveloped VLPs and the presence of the env protein can provide more antigenic determinants [22] . We took advantage of gag self-assembly and co-expressed gag and env to produce VLPs. Our approach demonstrated that this cell line could not only produce stable VLPs, but also secrete significant quantities of VLPs into the supernatant. The VLPs produced by our method without viral nucleic acid are not only safer, but also induce a strong humoral and cellular immune response, and provide a foundation for improving HIV vaccination. Because the recombinant Gagpol and Env proteins have similar structures to that of the wild HIV-1, additional work is required to fully understand how this approach could be used for advanced clinical applications.