Dr. Todd Bradley Leading the Way in HIV Vaccine Research

Dr. Todd Bradley was recently awarded a 5-year, $2.9 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health – National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Developing an HIV vaccine is a top global health priority and a key goal of a protective vaccine is eliciting antibodies that can neutralize the broad diversity of HIV viral strains and prevent infection,” Dr. Bradley said. “The results of our study will help identify novel strategies that can be applied during HIV-1 vaccination to improve immune responses.”

Dr. Bradley’s “Natural killer cell regulation of the germinal center HIV neutralizing antibody response” study will determine key molecular pathways that are critical for natural killer cell immunoregulation of the HIV antibody response and evaluate the effects of modulating these responses in a preclinical HIV vaccine trial.

Dr. Bradley was also published in Science this month for previous research around HIV vaccines. As a part of a team of researchers at Duke and Harvard, they demonstrated that an HIV vaccine could be engineered to coax the immune system to select key antibodies to fight HIV, overcoming a long-standing hurdle in HIV vaccine development.

Read the full article "Targeted selection of HIV-specific antibody mutations by engineering B cell maturation" via Science.