Nanoemulsion vaccines show increasing promise

Early HIV study tests mucosal immunity

Baker’s team has published results from a preliminary test of a nanoemulsion vaccine’s effectiveness against HIV in the February issue of AIDS Research Human Retroviruses.

It is becoming widely acknowledged that standard approaches to vaccines against HIV have not worked. Baker says the HIV nanoemulsion vaccine tested in the noses of mice in the study represents “a different approach in the way it produces immunity and the type of immunity produced.”

Vaccines administered in the nose are also able to induce mucosal immunity in the genital mucosa. Evidence is growing that HIV virus can infect the mucosal immune system.

“Therefore, developing mucosal immunity may be very important for protection against HIV,” Baker says, adding that previous vaccine approaches have not aimed to do that.

In the study, the nanoemulsion HIV vaccine showed it was able to induce mucosal immunity, cellular immunity and neutralizing antibody to various isolates of HIV virus. A protein used by the team, gp120, is one of the major binding proteins under study in other HIV vaccine approaches.

“This was an exploratory study to see if further research is warranted,” Baker says. His team plans further research to test the concept in animal models, potentially with whole viral vaccines or ones with multiple protein components.

For more on the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences, visit www.nano.med.umich.edu

The smallpox study appears in Clinical Vaccine Immunology, Vol. 15(2), Feb. 2008.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, through the Great Lakes Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.

In addition to Bielinska and Baker, other University of Michigan authors include Alexander A. Chepurnov, Jeffrey J. Landers, Katarzyna W. Janczak, Tatiana S. Chepurnova and Gary D. Luker.

The HIV study results appear in AIDS Research Human Retroviruses, Vol. 24, Feb. 2008. The study was funded by the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences, the Ruth Dow Doan Endowment and the Burroughs Welcome Fund.

In addition to Baker, authors include Anna U. Bielinska, Katarzyna W. Janczak, Jeffrey J. Landers and David M. Markovitz of the U-M Medical School and David C. Montefiori of the Duke University Medical Center.

A patent has been granted and assigned to U-M for the nanoemulsion vaccine technique, which has been exclusively licensed to NanoBio Corp., an Ann Arbor based biotech company in which Baker has a financial interest.