＊D5 Medical & Life Science Seminar＊

June 21 2017

We would like to inform you that the "D5 Medical & Life Science Seminar　AY 2017　D5 「International Biomedical Research Seminars」"

has been scheduled as below. We would be pleased to see many of you participating in the seminar.

Date:   June 21, 2017 (Wed)      Time:  17:30 - 18:30

Venue:  IRCMS 1F Meeting Lounge  

Speaker: Tomas HANKE  Ph.D.   

Distinguished Professor,
IRCMS, JAPAN and Professor, Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford University, United Kingdom

"Attaching the Achilles heel of HIV"

One of the major challenges in development of an effective vaccine against HIV-1 is the enormous capacity of HIV-1 for adaptation and diversification. This is because over the course of natural infection, immune responses through the actions of antibodies, cytotoxic CD8⁺ T cells and perhaps innate responses drive rapid HIV-1 evolution known as immune escape. Under this strong selective pressure, HIV-1 evolved to have immunodominant epitopes in the most variable regions of its proteins as decoys, while the more functionally/structurally conserved, harder-to-change and therefore more protective determinants remain subdominant. As a result, many of the potentially protective epitopes are left underutilized and/or completely ignored by the immune system. During natural infection, the initially strong CD8⁺ T-cell responses are thought to be swayed towards rapidly changing immunodominant epitopes and by the time the more protective subdominant epitopes may be targeted, damage to the immune system is already irreparable. Harnessing the protective potential of and (re)focusing CD8⁺ T cells on the HIV-1 conserved regions by active immunization is the central theorem to our strategy to develop and effective HIV-1 vaccine.