Retrospective Proteomic Analysis of Cellular Immune Responses and Protective Correlates of p24 Vaccination in an HIV Elite Controller Using Antibody Arrays

Background: HIV p24 is an extracellular HIV antigen involved in viral replication. Falling p24 antibody responses are associated with clinical disease progression and their preservation with non-progressive disease. Stimulation of p24 antibody production by immunization to delay progression was the basis of discontinued p24 vaccine. We studied a therapy-naive HIV+ man from Sydney, Australia, infected in 1988. He received the HIV-p24-virus like particle (VLP) vaccine in 1993, and continues to show vigorous p24 antigen responses (>4% p24-specific CD4(+) T cells), coupled with undetectable plasma viremia. We defined immune-protective correlates of p24 vaccination at the proteomic level through parallel retrospective analysis of cellular immune responses to p24 antigen in CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells and CD14(+) monocytes at viremic and aviremic phases using antibody-array. We found statistically significant coordinated up-regulation by all three cell-types with high fold-changes in fractalkine, ITAC, IGFBP-2, and MIP-1α in the aviremic phase. TECK and TRAIL-R4 were down-regulated in the viremic phase and up-regulated in the aviremic phase. The up-regulation of fractalkine in all three cell-types coincided with protective effect, whereas the dysfunction in anti-apoptotic chemokines with the loss of immune function. This study highlights the fact that induction of HIV-1-specific helper cells together with coordinated cellular immune response (p < 0.001) might be important in immunotherapeutic interventions and HIV vaccine development.