Detection and activation of HIV broadly neutralizing antibody precursor B cells using anti-idiotypes

Bancroft, Tara; DeBuysscher, Blair L.; Weidle, Connor; Schwartz, Allison; Wall, Abigail; Gray, Matthew D.; Feng, Junli; Steach, Holly R.; Fitzpatrick, Kristin S.; Gewe, Mesfin M.; Skog, Patrick D.; Doyle-Cooper, Colleen; Ota, Takayuki; Strong, Roland K.; Nemazee, David; Pancera, Marie; Stamatatos, Leonidas; McGuire, Andrew T.; Taylor, Justin J.

The observation that a subset of HIV-1-infected individuals develop broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) targeting the HIV-1 envelope protein (Env) that are capable of neutralizing diverse HIV-1 viral isolates over the course of infection demonstrates that the human immune system is capable of generating bNAb responses provided it receives the appropriate antigenic stimulation. Indeed, numerous bNAbs have been isolated from infected individuals that define the sites of vulnerability and mechanisms of neutralization of HIV-1 (West et al., 2014; Burton and Hangartner, 2016; Kwong and Mascola, 2018) . Importantly, bNAbs have been shown to protect from experimental infection in animal models, suggesting that they will be an important component of an effective vaccine against HIV-1 (Mascola et al., 1999; Shibata et al., 1999; Parren et al., 2001; Hessell et al., 2009; Moldt et al., 2012; Pietzsch et al., 2012; Gruell et al., 2013; Balazs et al., 2014; Shingai et al., 2014; Gautam et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2016) .