HIV Serosignatures for Cross-sectional Incidence Estimation

Unmet Need
According to UNAIDS, there were approximately 36.9 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS in 2017.  An estimated 1.8 million individuals worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2017 – about 5,000 new infections per day.

Measuring the incidence of HIV in a population is important for improving at-risk populations and intervention strategies, as well as monitoring the effectiveness of HIV prevention and treatment programs.  Furthermore, quickly identifying newly infected individuals is important as new treatments are capable of suppressing the virus, preventing its spread.  Determining HIV incidence continues to be challenging, involving multiple rounds of surveillance over many years in the same population groups as well as follow-ups with HIV-negative cohorts.  Such studies are expensive and time consuming, with high dropout rates.  Thus, there is a compelling need for new more direct assays to measure HIV incidence that remove the burden of longitudinal studies. 
 
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have identified of regions of the HIV genome that encode HIV peptides that are selectively targeted by antibodies in individuals with HIV infections of different duration.  Experiments demonstrated that the levels of antibody binding to peptides are associated with duration of HIV infection.  Additionally, antibody binding to individual peptides either increases or decreases with increasing duration of HIV infection.  Sets of engineered HIV peptides demonstrated increased or decreased association between antibody binding and duration of HIV infection.  Data from multiple sets of HIV peptides can be combined to generate multi-peptide "serosignatures" that can be used to classify clinical antibody samples as "recently" or "non-recently" infected, as well as an estimate of HIV infection duration.  Antibodies that bind these multi-peptide sets may be useful as biomarkers for estimating the duration of HIV infection and the rate of new HIV infections in surveillance studies/surveys, clinical trials, cohort studies, and populations.
 
Test results can be used alone or in multi-assay algorithms to estimate HIV incidence and for related applications.  These peptides are capable of being incorporated into simpler, high throughput assays that can be used for low-cost, high-throughput testing, providing a new way of estimating HIV prevalence without the need for difficult longitudinal studies.
 
Stage of Development
In vitro data is available.

Publications
Manuscript in preparation
 

Category(s):