Immunogenicity of hybrid DNA vaccines expressing hepatitis B core particles carrying human and simian immunodeficiency virus epitopes in mice and rhesus macaques

An effective HIV vaccine will likely need to induce broad and potent CTL responses. Epitope-based vaccines offer significant potential for inducing multi-specific CTL, but often require conjugation to T helper epitopes or carrier moieties to induce significant responses. We tested hybrid DNA vaccines encoding one or more HIV or SIV CTL epitopes fused to a hepatitis B core antigen (HBcAg) carrier gene as a means to improve the immunogenicity of epitope-based DNA vaccines. Immunization of mice with a HBcAg-HIV epitope DNA vaccine induced CD8+ T cell responses that significantly exceeded levels induced with DNA encoding either the whole HIV antigen or the epitope alone. In rhesus macaques, a multi-epitope hybrid HBcAg-SIV DNA vaccine induced CTL responses to 13 different epitopes, including 3 epitopes that were previously not detected in SIV-infected macaques. These data demonstrate that immunization with hybrid HBcAg-epitope DNA vaccines is an effective strategy to increase the magnitude and breadth of HIV-specific CTL responses.