Development of a monkey model for testing antiviral

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Summary: A good animal model for HIV-1 is essential for AIDS vaccine studies and development of efficacious anti-viral agents. Additionally, such a model will provide insight into the mechanism of correlates of virus infection and protection. We have obtained reproducible, long-term HIV-1 infection in pig-tailed macaques and have evaluated virus infection in animals that received high and low doses of HIV-1/LAI. Although, each animal responded uniquely to the infection, in all cases HIV-1 antibodies developed and viral sequences were detected in the PBMCs. No significant clinical symptoms were seen. The results of our study indicate that pig-tailed macaques may be a useful animal model for evaluating the efficacy of novel vaccine strategies. To investigate whether pig-tailed macaques are a good animal model for vaccine studies, we tested the efficacy of the DNA prime with protein boost strategy using our HIV-1 DNA vaccines with subsequent Env protein boost against challenge with homologous virus (HIV-1/LAI). Virus could not be detected in the plasma of animals immunized with a vaccine DNA containing the CMV promoter. PBMC DNA was analyzed by PCR using pol and gag primers to further evaluate virus infection. The results indicate that pig-tailed macaques can be used to demonstrate the efficacy of immunization strategies using HIV/LAI based vaccines against homologous challenge virus.