Biological Products Core (AIDS and Cancer Virus Program)

The Biological Products Core provides the AIDS research community with high-quality purified preparations of various strains of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), economically prepared by leveraging the economy of scale. Materials provided include chemically inactivated virus prepared by treatment with Aldrithiol-2. This chemical inactivation method was developed by AIDS and Cancer Virus Program personnel and eliminates infectivity while preserving functional surface proteins, including envelope glycoproteins. This property makes them attractive preparations for experimental vaccine studies and for use in experiments in which non-infectious, authentic viral particles are required. BPC is operated by Leidos Biomedical Research Inc. on behalf of NCI as part of the Frederick National Laboratory.

Since the T-cell lines used to propagate HIV and SIV also produce microvesicles (extracellular vesicles that bud from the cell surface) that can contaminate even highly purified retrovirus preparations, we also produce purified microvesicle preparations from non-infected cell lines for use as a “negative” control reagent matched to virus preparations of interest.

The Biological Products Core also produces HIV-1 p24CA antigen capture immunoassay kits, originally developed for use in our own laboratory to monitor virus yields from production cultures or infectivity assays. Unlike commercial kits, these kits were developed for measuring the relatively high capsid protein concentrations obtained in productively infected cell cultures and to make these measurements over an extended range of concentrations. Kits are provided for research use only and are not appropriate for use on human samples.

We also prepare a variety of virus preparations on a small scale to accommodate the needs of researchers who require only a small amount of virus in a certain format. These often require derivation of infected cell lines and optimization of a virus propagation method.