Polyclonal B cell differentiation and loss of gastrointestinal tract germinal centers in the earliest stages of HIV-1 infection.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The antibody response to HIV-1 does not appear in the plasma until approximately 2-5 weeks after transmission, and neutralizing antibodies to autologous HIV-1 generally do not become detectable until 12 weeks or more after transmission. Moreover, levels of HIV-1-specific antibodies decline on antiretroviral treatment. The mechanisms of this delay in the appearance of anti-HIV-1 antibodies and of their subsequent rapid decline are not known. While the effect of HIV-1 on depletion of gut CD4(+) T cells in acute HIV-1 infection is well described, we studied blood and tissue B cells soon after infection to determine the effect of early HIV-1 on these cells. METHODS AND FINDINGS: In human participants, we analyzed B cells in blood as early as 17 days after HIV-1 infection, and in terminal ileum inductive and effector microenvironments beginning at 47 days after infection. We found that HIV-1 infection rapidly induced polyclonal activation and terminal differentiation of B cells in blood and in gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) B cells. The specificities of antibodies produced by GALT memory B cells in acute HIV-1 infection (AHI) included not only HIV-1-specific antibodies, but also influenza-specific and autoreactive antibodies, indicating very early onset of HIV-1-induced polyclonal B cell activation. Follicular damage or germinal center loss in terminal ileum Peyer's patches was seen with 88% of follicles exhibiting B or T cell apoptosis and follicular lysis. CONCLUSIONS: Early induction of polyclonal B cell differentiation, coupled with follicular damage and germinal center loss soon after HIV-1 infection, may explain both the high rate of decline in HIV-1-induced antibody responses and the delay in plasma antibody responses to HIV-1. Please see later in the article for Editors' Summary.

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Citation

Published Version (Please cite this version)

10.1371/journal.pmed.1000107

Publication Info

Levesque, Marc C, M Anthony Moody, Kwan-Ki Hwang, Dawn J Marshall, John F Whitesides, Joshua D Amos, Thaddeus C Gurley, Sallie Allgood, et al. (2009). Polyclonal B cell differentiation and loss of gastrointestinal tract germinal centers in the earliest stages of HIV-1 infection. PLoS Med, 6(7). p. e1000107. 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000107 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10895.

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Scholars@Duke

Moody

Michael Anthony Moody

Professor of Pediatrics

Tony Moody, MD is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Infectious Diseases and Professor in the Department of Integrative Immunobiology at Duke University Medical Center. Research in the Moody lab is focused on understanding the B cell responses during infection, vaccination, and disease. The lab has become a resource for human phenotyping, flow characterization, staining and analysis at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI). The Moody lab is currently funded to study influenza, syphilis, HIV-1, and emerging infectious diseases.

Dr. Moody is the director of the Duke CIVICs Vaccine Center (DCVC) at (DHVI) and co-director of the Centers for Research of Emerging Infectious Disease Coordinating Center (CREID-CC). Dr. Moody is co-PI of a U19 program to develop a syphilis vaccine; this program is led by Dr. Justin Radolf at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Moody is also the director of the DHVI Accessioning Unit, a biorepository that provides support for work occurring at DHVI and with its many collaborators around the world by providing processing, shipping, and inventory support for a wide array of projects.

Dr. Moody and his team are involved in many networks studying vaccine response including the Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs) and the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN).

Parker

Daniel Christopher Parker

Assistant Professor of Medicine

Biological aging is the greatest risk factor for most chronic diseases, including frailty and dementia. The geroscience hypothesis posits that interventions that target aspects of biological aging may delay or prevent many of these diseases simultaneously. My research centers on understanding the mechanisms of interventions that affect biological aging, like exercise training and caloric restriction and using that understanding to develop therapies that maintain cognitive and physical function in older adults.

Tomaras

Georgia Doris Tomaras

Professor in Surgery

Dr. Georgia Tomaras is a tenured Professor of Surgery, Professor of Immunology, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Dr. Tomaras is Co-Director of the Center for Human Systems Immunology (CHSI) Duke University and Director of the Duke Center for AIDS Research (CFAR). Her national and international leadership roles include: Executive Management Team (EMT) leader and mPI for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN); Director of Lab Sciences (HVTN); and Chair of NIH Vaccine Research Center (VRC) Board of Scientific Counselors. Her prior leadership roles include serving as the Director of Research, Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI); Director of the DHVI Training Program; Associate Director of DHVI Research; Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Training Program in AIDS (IRTPA) Duke; Chair of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) AIDS Vaccine Research Subcommittee (AVRS), and Advisory Counsel member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Dr. Tomaras’ primary research focus is deciphering mechanisms of protective human immunity and identification of immune correlates of protection to further development of effective vaccines against infectious diseases.  

 

Kelsoe

Garnett H. Kelsoe

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Immunology
  1. Lymphocyte development and antigen-driven diversification of immunoglobulin and T cell antigen receptor genes.
    2. The germinal center reaction and mechanisms for clonal selection and self - tolerance. The origins of autoimmunity.
    3. Interaction of innate- and adaptive immunity and the role of inflammation in lymphoid organogenesis.
    4. The role of secondary V(D)J gene rearrangment in lymphocyte development and malignancies.
    5. Mathematical modeling of immune responses, DNA motifs, collaborations in bioinformatics.
    6. Humoral immunity to influenza and HIV-1.
Haynes

Barton Ford Haynes

Frederic M. Hanes Distinguished Professor of Medicine

Barton F. Haynes, M.D. is the Frederic M. Hanes Professor of Medicine and Immunology, and Director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. Prior to leading the DHVI, Dr. Haynes served as Chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and later as Chair of the Department of Medicine. As Director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, Bart Haynes is leading a team of investigators working on vaccines for emerging infections, including tuberculosis, pandemic influenza, emerging coronaviruses, and HIV/AIDS.

To work on the AIDS vaccine problem, his group has been awarded two large consortium grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) known as the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) (2005-2012), and the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology-Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID) (2012-2019) to conduct discovery science to speed HIV vaccine development. In July 2019, his team received the third of NIH “CHAVI” awards to complete the HIV vaccine development work - CHAV-D.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Haynes and the DHVI Team has been working non-stop to develop vaccines, rapid and inexpensive tests and therapeutics to combat the pandemic. Since March 2020, he has served as a member of the NIH Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) committee to advise on COVID-19 vaccine development, and served as the co-chair of the ACTIV subcommittee on vaccine safety. Haynes is the winner of the Alexander Fleming Award from the Infectious Disease Society of America and the Ralph Steinman Award for Human Immunology Research from the American Association of Immunologists. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the Haynes Laboratory
The Haynes lab is studying host innate and adaptive immune responses to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB), and influenza in order to find the enabling technology to make preventive vaccines against these three major infectious diseases.

Mucosal Immune Responses in Acute HIV Infection

The Haynes lab is working to determine why broadly neutralizing antibodies are rarely made in acute HIV infection (AHI), currently a major obstacle in the development of an HIV vaccine. The lab has developed a novel approach to define the B cell repertories in AHI in order to find neutralizing antibodies against the virus. This approach uses linear Immunoglobulin (Ig) heavy and light chain gene expression cassettes to express Ig V(H) and V(L) genes isolated from sorted single B cells as IgG1 antibody without a cloning step. This strategy was used to characterize the Ig repertoire of plasma cells/plasmablasts in AHI and to produce recombinant influenza mAbs from sorted single human plasmablasts after influenza vaccination.

The lab is also studying the earliest effect HIV-1 has on B cells. Analyzing blood and gut-associated lymphoid tissues (GALT) during acute HIV infection, they have found that as early as 17 days after transmission HIV-1 induces B cell class switching and 47 days after transmission, HIV-1 causes considerable damage to GALT germinal centers. They found that in AHI, GALT memory B cells induce polyclonal B cell activation due to the presence of HIV-1-specific, influenza-specific, and autoreactive antibodies. The team concluded from this study that early induction of polyclonal B cell differentiation, along with follicular damage and germinal center loss, may explain why HIV-1 induced antibody responses decline rapidly during acute HIV infection and why plasma antibody responses are delayed.

The lab is also looking at ways of generating long-lived memory B cell responses to HIV infection, another major hurdle in the development of a successful HIV-1 vaccine. The lab has found that in HIV-1 gp120 envelope vaccination and chronic HIV-1 infection, HIV-1 envelope induces predominantly short-lived memory B cell-dependent plasma antibodies.

Immunogen Design

To overcome the high level of genetic diversity in HIV-1 envelope genes, the Haynes lab is developing strategies to induce antibodies that cross-react with multiple strains of HIV. The lab has designed immunogens based on transmitted founder Envs and mosaic consensus Envs in collaboration with Dr. Bette Korber at Los Alamos National Laboratory. These immunogens are designed to induce antibodies that cross-react with a multiple subtype Env glycoproteins. The goal is to determine if cross-reactive mAbs to highly conserved epitopes in HIV-1 envelope glycoproteins can be induced. The team recently characterized a panel of ten mAbs that reacted with varying breadth to subtypes A, B, C, D, F, G, CRF01_AE, and a highly divergent SIVcpzUS Env protein. Two of the mAbs cross-reacted with all tested Env proteins, including SIVcpzUS Env and bound Env proteins with high affinity.

Mucosal Immune Responses in TB and Influenza

The Haynes lab is helping to develop novel approaches to TB vaccine development. The current therapeutic vaccine for TB, called BCG, may prevent complications from TB in children, but offers little protection against infection and disease in adults. The lab is focused on using live attenuated Mycobacterium tuberculosis mutants as vaccine candidates and is currently evaluating this approach in non-human primate studies. As part of the DHVI Influenza program, they are studying the B cell response to influenza in order to generate a “universal” flu vaccine. They are currently trying to express more highly conserved influenza antigens in recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) vectors in order to elicit robust T cell and antibody responses to those antigens.

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