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Signature Seminar Series: Computational Approaches to HIV-1 Vaccine Development
ABOUT THE LECTURE:A central challenge in developing a protective HIV vaccine is the reliable elicitation of broadly neutralising antibodies (bnAbs). However, even in the infection setting, HIV bnAbs arise very rarely. One reason HIV bnAbs are rare is that they require the acquisition of mutations that are not regularly made by the B cell’s mutational machinery. To address this challenge, we developed a computational program to estimate the probabilities of antibody mutations and showed that improbable mutations can act as rate-limiting steps in the development of HIV bnAbs. Building on this insight, we developed a mutation-guided vaccine design strategy for designing immunogens and vaccine regimens that target the selection of improbable mutations to alleviate mutational bottlenecks and accelerate HIV bnAb elicitation. Here, we show that in humanised mouse models the mutation-guided vaccine design strategy can reliably and reproducibly direct the maturation of an HIV bnAb lineage. Importantly, this vaccine design framework is widely generalisable and applicable to vaccines where eliciting specific antibody responses is desired.
HOST:
Dr Ashley Lauren St. John
Associate Professor
Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme
Duke-NUS Medical School
VENUE:
Duke-NUS Medical School
Amphitheatre, Level 2
CONTACT PERSON:
Ms Kathleen Chan (kathleen.chan@duke-nus.edu.sg)
Duke-NUS Research Affairs Department
Date and Time
29 Apr 2026 @ 12:00 - 29 Apr 2026 @ 13:00
Speaker
Dr Kevin Wiehe
Norman L. Letvin Associate Professor
Department of Medicine
Duke University School of Medicine
Kevin Wiehe is the Norman L. Letvin Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University and the Director of Research at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. He is a computational immunologist whose research is focused on developing computational approaches to study B cell evolution. Dr. Wiehe’s work seeks to understand how broadly neutralising
antibodies arise in response to rapidly evolving pathogens, with the ultimate goal of informing the design of next‑generation vaccines.