Maurice Wilkins Centre special research seminar: Development of a Defective Particle HIV Vaccine

Tuesday, 19 June 2012
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Location: At MAC 1 Seminar Room, Old Biology Building, 5 Symonds Street, Auckland

Speaker: Professor Ronald B Luftig, Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Centre
Department: Maurice Wilkins Centre

Professor Luftig is an electron microscopist with an interest in viral morphogenesis.  His early work on Murine Leukemia Viruses involved discovery of retroviral proteases and he showed that "Immature" particles were converted to "Mature" infectious ones as a result of activation of the protease at the cell plasma membrane, during and/or after budding.

His group developed the earliest Protease Inhibitors(PI), which then served as the model system for the current successful HIV PI that have substantially prolonged the life of AIDS patients.  About 12 years ago his group, in collaboration with Kazuyoshi Ikuta developed HIV L2 defective particles, which are protease deficient and contain about 7x more enveloped spikes than HIV. A patent was awarded in 2001 and current trials are being performed to develop an L2 based HIV vaccine.