When you tell someone that you’re working in an HIV lab, they typically assume that all of your work is dedicated to finding a vaccine and while Dr. Barton Haynes’ lab does desperately want to find a way to prevent people from contracting HIV, a vaccine would not help the almost 37 million people living with HIV today. For that, you need to be thinking about drugs.
In the virus, specifically located on the outside of the virus, there are several “weak spots”, or “Achilles heel” as Dr. Barton Haynes likes to describe them, that antibodies can bind to in order to neutralize HIV, however, most of the antibodies that the HIV infection people produce are not strong enough to be able to do so. There are some people who naturally produce these antibodies, which are called broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) and while bnAbs are successful in their HIV binding endeavors, they bring on other problems. Specifically they way they behave over time in certain buffer solutions. My project aims to characterize the way that four different broadly neutralizing antibodies behave when placed in 6 different buffers. This is important because eliminating some of the issues that occur when antibodies are placed in their current buffer solutions could help expand the ways that the antibodies are able to be used.
While my project on a day to day basis is essentially moving tiny volumes of liquid into more tiny volumes of liquid and then testing the tiny volumes of liquid in tiny wells, the implication of my findings could be huge as they have the possibility of contributing to the creation of therapeutic drugs to prevent the progression of HIV.
