Grant: Operating Grant - PA: HIV/AIDS Bridge Funding - Biomedical/Clinical Stream

People with HIV tend to get the kind of lung disease we normally see in people who have smoked for a very long time. In HIV, this lung disease happens even in young people who have never smoked before. It is not clear right now why the disease is so much more severe in HIV, but one possible cause is that the lungs of HIV patients might age faster than the lungs of people without HIV. We will measure the rate of aging in cells from the blood and lungs of HIV patients and we will see whether this aging rate is related to how much HIV virus is in the lungs. Finally, we will see whether HIV in the lung changes the structure of genes in the cells. These changes might allow us to tell which HIV patients will go on to get lung disease in the future, and to help scientists and physicians come up with better drugs and treatments for lung disease.