Objective
The study of development and function of the immune system in vivo has made intensive use of animal models, but performing such work in human beings is difficult, for experimental, practical and ethical reasons.
Confronted to this scientific challenge, several pioneering groups have developed in the late 80s mouse models of human immune system development. The system has now been considerably improved with the Human Immune System (HIS) mouse that exhibits a complete human innate and adaptive immune system.
This new model is extremely suitable to test the response of the human immune system to candidate HIV vaccines in an in vivo setting. I propose in the present project to validate the HIS mice as a new model to study HIV vaccination. For infection, we will use a new promising strain, the HIV-rtTA, a conditional live-attenuated virus.
In this virus, the replication is controlled and dependent on the presence of a non-toxic effector molecule and thus can be turned on and off at will in a graded and reversible manner. This drug-dependent virus will provide a unique reagent to study the virus-host interaction and viral pathogenicity in vivo.
As a vaccination approach, one would like to limit virus replication to the extent that is needed to mount a protective immune response, after which replication is stopped and subsequent virus evolution is blocked.
The use of HIV-rtTA virus in the HIS mouse will provide relevant information on the requirements for a vaccine to obtain protection against HIV. Overall, this project will contribute to the validation of the HIS mouse model as a tool for pre-clinical tests.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyvirology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsmutationvirus mutation
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunology
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA virusesHIV
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
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Call for proposal
FP6-2005-MOBILITY-5
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European FellowshipsCoordinator
AMSTERDAM
Netherlands