Recent scientific advances have brought us closer to the elusive goal of an HIV vaccine, but reaching that goal requires broad collaboration to adapt breakthroughs in the physical sciences and engineering to our understanding of interactions between viruses and the immune system. One of the challenges of developing a vaccine against HIV is that to prevent viruses from getting into cells or prevent progeny viruses from being produced, each of the various arms of the immune response needs to be addressed:

		the innate immune response
		the adaptive immune response involving antigen presenting cells
		B cells making neutralizing antibodies
		cytotoxic T cells
		and T helper cells.

Part of the problem in the field has been that, until recently, there has been very little integration across these different aspects of the immune response.

The Ragon Institute offers an incredible opportunity to transform academic research by bringing together diverse disciplines, people, ideas and approaches to confront and overcome basic and applied challenges hindering the development of a vaccine against HIV.

The Institute is taking steps toward vaccine development, including development of a humanized mouse model to predict vaccine-induced immune responses in humans, determination of the effector function of immune cells at the single cell level, and multidisciplinary studies of individuals who control HIV without medication, as well as those with acute HIV infection.