PLOS ONE. 2020 Jan 30; 15(1):e0226803.

PubMed ID: 31999736

Landscapes of binding antibody and T-cell responses to pox-protein HIV vaccines in Thais and South Africans

Zhao LP, Fiore-Gartland A, Carpp LN, Cohen KW, Rouphael N, Fleurs L, Dintwe O, Zhao M, Moodie Z, Fong Y, Garrett N, Huang Y, Innes C, Janes HE, Lazarus E, Michael NL, Nitayaphan S, Pitisuttithum P, Rerks-Ngarm S, Robb ML, De Rosa SC, Corey L, Gray GE, Seaton KE, Yates NL, McElrath MJ, Frahm N, Tomaras GD, Gilbert PB

HIV vaccine trials routinely measure multiple vaccine-elicited immune responses to compare regimens and study their potential associations with protection. Here we employ unsupervised learning tools facilitated by a bidirectional power transformation to explore the multivariate binding antibody and T-cell response patterns of immune responses elicited by two pox-protein HIV vaccine regimens. Both regimens utilized a recombinant canarypox vector (ALVAC-HIV) prime and a bivalent recombinant HIV-1 Envelope glycoprotein 120 subunit boost. We hypothesized that within each trial, there were participant subgroups sharing similar immune responses and that their frequencies differed across trials.