A Seemingly Unstoppable Virus: Can Humanity Ever Overcome HIV?

No universal vaccines exist for infectious diseases like HIV and influenza, largely due to the high frequency with which the pathogens that cause these diseases acquire mutations in their surface proteins. Hear from Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger as she describes our efforts to address this challenge for HIV using a variety of computational methods that include homology modeling, molecular simulations, mathematical modeling, and machine learning.

During the webinar, Dr. Sprenger will present on our efforts to understand, on a molecular level, how HIV is able to ‘escape’ from existing, best-of-class antibodies called broadly neutralizing antibodies, or bnAbs. She will share a feature of the work happening at CU Boulder to glean fundamental insight into vaccine design principles for eliciting such bnAbs using a coarse-grained mathematical model. Finally, she will showcase our efforts to develop a more realistic model of the antibody evolution process, enabling the design of real, HIV-like vaccine-candidate protein sequences with an optimized ability to elicit bnAbs. Learn more about Dr. Sprenger below.

Contact the Alumni Engagement Team at EngAlumni@colorado.edu with any questions.

Oct 20, 2021 12:00 PM in Mountain Time (US and Canada)