Sean Rameswaram
speaker
7,113 appearances
119 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Sep
Sean Rameswaram’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 46 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 11.
Appearances
This envelope protein that we thought was the ideal target, we still think it's a good target, but something about
the targets that we're going after within it are not eliciting the type of immune responses that we need.
So we need to really do our immunological homework, do the analysis, and figure out what it is exactly that we need to get an effective product.
And what is it?
Well...
HIV, when it comes to its envelope protein, most of it is basically kind of a decoy.
The part that the immune system sees changes really easily.
It's not that important to the virus, so they can just mutate.
And so whenever we would try to go after it, our vaccines wouldn't work.
And so when scientists then looked deeper into what it is that gets you kind of a truly
effective immune response, the kind that is going to neutralize all the different viruses that are out there, all the HIV viruses that are out there, with all its variability, they realized that we were kind of going after the wrong part of the envelope protein and the part
that gets you the kind of immune response we need is kind of hidden and only a small minority of people who are naturally infected develop those immune responses.
And so the key was what we can now see in those rare individuals is that they have these immune responses, but it's even more complicated because they don't just get them right away.
What the immune system does is it kind of matures over several months, even years.
as it learns and evolves to recognize those key parts of the virus.
And so in order to do that in a vaccine, researchers now think they basically need to give a series of components, kind of a series of different pieces of that envelope protein in the right order, with the right timing, to...
kind of nudge and carve out exactly the immune response that we want.
And they think they basically know how to do that, although there's a fair amount of trial and error that will be necessary going forward to kind of refine that strategy.
How big a deal is this moment for the people who've been at it for decades, if they're even still around?
Yeah, I mean, the HIV vaccine research field has a lot of old timers, that's for sure, both here in the United States, but also in South Africa.
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