Grant: Fellowship - PA: Biomedical / Clinical HIV/AIDS Research

In 2007, there were 33.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS, and the number of women infected with HIV was estimated at 15.4 million. In Canada, the rate of infection is increasing and particularly in women and Aboriginal people. Preventive vaccine strategies are still under development, but until now clinical trials have failed to prove the efficiency and safety of commercially available compounds. A subset of HIV infected individuals known as Elite controllers show a particularly slow and benign course of disease progression. Understanding the factors associated with the absence of progression will help to develop an HIV vaccine. Because, many factors could be involved in the control of this disease, our study will focus on the analysis of the genetic and immune system of Canadian Aboriginal people. For the genetic part, we will analyse the genes associated with the antigen presentation (called HLA), the cell receptor for the HIV virus (CD4) and the proteins which binds this receptor (Rantes and SDF-1). We will also study the presence of polymorphisms and the expression of those genes. For the immune part, we will mainly focus on an important immune cell called T cells. T cells have major functions in the immune system and they play a role at different levels: they can kill the virus, produce substances that lead to the activation of other immune cells or repressed the activation of immune cells. The virus also targets T cells and it has been shown that during HIV infection, their counts decrease with the disease progression. In this study we will look at the activation markers present on T cells subsets. Based on what was observed in HIV resistant persons, we believe that the Elite controllers should have an expression pattern different from the other HIV infected persons. The study of these individuals will provide extremely important insight into the control and protection mechanisms to HIV and may yield important clues for vaccine development.