reidrubsamen

We are setting up an open science web site within the next few weeks that will update people on the project on a regular basis. We are exploring options for rapid publication including ways to post our work during the review process. If you have any ideas here, please let us know using team@immunityproject.org

Thanks for your comments! We have a great team with a lot of experience in computer science, drug delivery and HIV-relevant lab immunology. I studied biochemistry and computer science at UC Berkeley - then going to Stanford for an MD and MS in Computer Science - was in the PhD program in course 6-2 at MIT - left (without getting the PhD) to start Aradigm in Hayward where I worked for 10 years on inhaled insulin.

That was a complex project that required a lot of special technology, much of which we developed ourselves, to make and characterize micro-particles.

CV Herst, Pete Lloyd and I (all part of the Aradigm founding team) have been working together at Immunity Project since the beginning - Pete is an ME (UC Berkeley and Davis) who built and operates our precision spray drying system for sphere manufacturing. CV got his MPH at Berkeley in Med Micro and his PhD from North Western in Mo Bio later doing a post doc at MD Anderson. He has extensive experience working with HIV in both the diagnostic and lab research setting requiring handling the virus in cell culture.

We as physician scientists never really learned how to communicate science broadly to the public - I think our open science approach, which will bring people close to what we are doing in the lab, is the best way to go! This is a learning process for us and I appreciate your support!

Hi! This is Reid, CEO of immunity project. Thanks for your comments! Our previous work is under review by a PRJ - our crowd funding is allowing us to do additional work which we will try to publish as quickly as possible! We have our white paper on our web site - if you want to discuss more details please shoot us an email at team@ImmunityProject.org

Sorry for the delay! It is certainly an interesting application and one that I am personally very interested in pursuing at some point. For now we are focusing on the preventative potential of this new vaccine concept.

Great comments! We expect the beneficial targets to be HLA restricted. We need to do more work to understand if any one individual needs to hit two targets - we think right now that a "master vaccine" would need to contain multiple peptides to cover multiple HLA type individuals yielding at least one "valid" target per individual.

Thanks very much for the kind note! I would be happy to send you a link to the paper the guys working on the statistical analysis of beneficial HIV target regions when it is published.

Thanks for the question! PLGA is the one of the most commonly implanted biodegradable materials in the world - primarily because it is used is used in dissolving suture (check out this link to very popular PLGA based suture material).

Aston S, Rees T. Vicryl Sutures. Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 1977;1:5.

The "threatening point" is just a way of describing what TLR-4 (MPLA) and TLR-9 (CpG) do. In particular, MPLA "looks like" bacterial cell wall and CpG "looks like" bacterial DNA to the immune system.

Steinhagen F. TLR-based immune adjuvants. Vaccine, 2011: 12.

We did not consider using nano spheres because we wanted to get as much payload as possible into the antigen presenting cells without requiring multiple phagocytosis events per cell.

This sounds really interesting! Let me talk to my team. I would love to discuss this with you further. Please email me at team@immunityproject.org

Thanks for the comment! We did not mean to imply that existing vaccines were dangerous and will modify the language on the site to clarify.

Hi there, Reid from Immunity Project. Thanks for the great question! Would love to talk with you off line about your research, by the way.

1. We have successfully gotten an immune response with memory (by elispot) after a single dose of the PLGA microspheres containing one or two peptides when combined with TLR-4 (MPLA) and TLR-9 (CpG) agonists. We used H2d restricted epitopes to do the study in C57BL/6 mice – this study is done and in the PRJ review process. We are being careful about posting the results in the event we need to re-submit to a journal who would get heartburn if they saw the data posted.

2. We are raising money now to essentially repeat the experiment (on a smaller scale because we think we understand the optimal formulation configuration now) in C57BL/6 NOG mice (with human PBMCs grafted in from a donor with known HLA type). The new experiment starts off looking like the experiment in (1) above: intradermal tail injection, wait 14 days, sacrifice, get the spleen, confirm immune response to peptide target by flurospot. The next part is new: separate CD8 from CD4 cells (from the mouse spleen), infect the CD4 cells with HIV, see if the vaccination attempt was good enough to see p24 antigen suppression and/or a change in the CD4 counts (all in-vitro). We can finish this study in a couple months, assuming the crowd funding keeps going well and we start in a couple weeks. We will use a different mechanism to publish our paper around this experiment so that we can get it out right away in a fashion that will lead to peer review and open access (We just learned about peerj.com – thoughts on that?).

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our approach.