Quantification of the Impact of the HIV-1-Glycan Shield on Antibody Elicitation

Publication date: 25 April 2017
Source:Cell Reports, Volume 19, Issue 4
Author(s): Tongqing Zhou, Nicole A. Doria-Rose, Cheng Cheng, Guillaume B.E. Stewart-Jones, Gwo-Yu Chuang, Michael Chambers, Aliaksandr Druz, Hui Geng, Krisha McKee, Young Do Kwon, Sijy O’Dell, Mallika Sastry, Stephen D. Schmidt, Kai Xu, Lei Chen, Rita E. Chen, Mark K. Louder, Marie Pancera, Timothy G. Wanninger, Baoshan Zhang, Anqi Zheng, S. Katie Farney, Kathryn E. Foulds, Ivelin S. Georgiev, M. Gordon Joyce, Thomas Lemmin, Sandeep Narpala, Reda Rawi, Cinque Soto, John-Paul Todd, Chen-Hsiang Shen, Yaroslav Tsybovsky, Yongping Yang, Peng Zhao, Barton F. Haynes, Leonidas Stamatatos, Michael Tiemeyer, Lance Wells, Diana G. Scorpio, Lawrence Shapiro, Adrian B. McDermott, John R. Mascola, Peter D. Kwong
While the HIV-1-glycan shield is known to shelter Env from the humoral immune response, its quantitative impact on antibody elicitation has been unclear. Here, we use targeted deglycosylation to measure the impact of the glycan shield on elicitation of antibodies against the CD4 supersite. We engineered diverse Env trimers with select glycans removed proximal to the CD4 supersite, characterized their structures and glycosylation, and immunized guinea pigs and rhesus macaques. Immunizations yielded little neutralization against wild-type viruses but potent CD4-supersite neutralization (titers 1: >1,000,000 against four-glycan-deleted autologous viruses with over 90% breadth against four-glycan-deleted heterologous strains exhibiting tier 2 neutralization character). To a first approximation, the immunogenicity of the glycan-shielded protein surface was negligible, with Env-elicited neutralization (ID50) proportional to the exponential of the protein-surface area accessible to antibody. Based on these high titers and exponential relationship, we propose site-selective deglycosylated trimers as priming immunogens to increase the frequency of site-targeting antibodies.

Graphical abstract

Teaser

Zhou et al. engineer diverse HIV-Env trimers with selective glycans removed around the CD4-receptor-binding site. They demonstrate the impact of the glycan shield on immunogenicity, uncover an exponential relationship between exposed antibody-accessible protein surface and Env immunogenicity, and achieve vaccine-elicited neutralization of glycan-deleted viruses.


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