Grant: Team Grant - HIV/AIDS and comorbidities

Despite universal access in Canada to therapies for HIV infection, people living with HIV/AIDS still suffer immensely from AIDS-related impairment of thinking processes. These HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) impose burdens to health, to daily personal function at home and at work, to society and to the economy. Our new multi-disciplinary team will investigate several interlinked elements of HAND: the frequency and distribution of HAND in the population, risk factors and diagnosis, molecular and cellular causes, and potential therapies for HAND. Our team includes established HIV researchers (Power, Gill, Cohen) as well as internationally recognized researchers new to this area but with expertise in virus research, cell biology, inflammation, nerve system degeneration and bioinformatics (Seidah, Hobman, Broadhurst). The team also includes knowledge users directly engaged with people living with HIV/AIDS and related community organizations. Over the past 25 years, team members have built a patient information database and collection of patient blood specimens that is the cornerstone of our proposed research. Our research will combine these patient data and biospecimen archives with our animal models of HAND, and with our expertise in genomics and statistical data interpretation of molecular information. Research goals are to investigate new mechanisms of disease, to develop novel disease markers for HAND diagnosis, and to find interventions to treat and/or prevent HAND. In addition to addressing the complex issues of HAND in people living with HIV/AIDS, our team will train new researchers in brain disorders that accompany HIV/AIDS. The overarching goal of this proposal is to create knowledge about the disease and the mechanisms underlying HAND. Such knowledge will guide our development of new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that together can eradicate HAND.