Methods of inducing an immune response against HIV by administering immunogenic peptides obtained from protease cleavage sites

Instead of generating immune responses to several HIV proteins and risk over activating more CD4+ T cells (easy targets for HIV-1 infection) as current candidate vaccines try to do, a lower magnitude, narrowly focused, well maintained virus specific CD8+ T cell response to multiple subtypes should destroy and eliminate a few founder viruses without inducing inflammatory responses that may activate more CD4+ T cells and provide more targets for HIV-1 virus infection. Specifically, described herein is a method that focuses the immune response to the 12 protease cleavage sites.