For over 40 years researchers have been trying and failing to generate vaccines to chronic viral infections. Hepatitis, HIV, herpes have all eluded efforts to generate effective vaccines. All of these viruses, but especially HIV, employ creative and ingenious methods to evade immune detection and continue to spread and grow, such as masking immunogenic epitopes and constant mutation. In an effort to try a radically new approach, we are trying to generate a targeted adjuvant formulation that can boost the efforts of the immune system to “unmask” and mark these viral particles. We are developing viral capturing microparticles that contain adjuvants. By capturing the circulating viral particles, we can prevent them from infecting new cells and offer an attractive target to naive antigen presenting cells. We call this strategy, “bait and switch immune activation” or BSIA. This allows the immune system to more readily find these viral particles but allows the natural mechanisms of immune development to make a response against the circulating strain in the patient, reducing the problem of antigenic shifting.
