23 October 2014 - 23 October 2014 – US company Antigen Discovery Inc reported Wednesday that it had received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Phase I Small Business Innovation Research award (SBIR) from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) for the development of a pan-HIV protein microarray chip which will contain every protein in all of the HIV-1 and HIV-2 subtypes and help the development of safe and effective vaccines and therapies to prevent HIV infection.

The one-year award is in the amount of USD 225,000 (EUR 178,022).

Dr. Douglas Molina, director of Proteomics at Antigen Discovery, said that the chip will allow fast characterisation of the humoral immune response to all HIV infections and HIV vaccination regimens to identify antibodies against broadly neutralising epitopes. Thus the chip will provide a useful, much needed tool to help the development of a safe and effective vaccine to prevent or treat HIV infection and the subsequent progression to AIDS.

As Dr. David Camerini, the principle investigator of the grant, explained, the development of safe and effective vaccine and therapeutics to prevent HIV-1 infection or the subsequent development of AIDS is of uttermost importance. However, the effort has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the correlates of protective immunity and a lack of the tools needed to measure effective anti-HIV-1 immune responses. The current version of the multi clade HIV-1 (MC-HIV-1) chip, available commercially from Antigen Discovery, contains HIV-1 proteins, protein fragments and epitopes from clades A1, A2, B, C and D, which comprise 74% of HIV-1 infections worldwide. With the support of the SBIR grant, the company will enhance the MC-HIV-1 chip by expanding its coverage to >91% HIV-1 infections and virtually all HIV-2 infections globally, thus creating a pan-HIV proteomic chip, Camerini noted.