Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

The first cases of infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Canada were reported over 25 years ago. Notwithstanding all the efforts to prevent new infections, it is estimated that 65,000 Canadians are living with HIV/AIDS and thousands are newly infected every year. While there has been significant progress in clinical treatment of HIV-1 and in understanding its relation with the human immune system, there are still no effective vaccines or therapies that eradicate the virus. Our project aims to better characterize how the virus can infect new individuals, what is called the transmission event. In most cases of transmission, only one viral particle is able to establish the infection. We will look specifically at those transmitted viruses compared with the large amount of non-transmitted in order to identify if there are any differences that could help promote the transmission event. If there are, those differences could be exploited for clinical intervention. These characterization studies are essential in order to establish the theoretical basis needed for the design of novel, next-generation anti-HIV-1 entry inhibitors, vaccine and microbicides that will specifically target the transmission event.