Grant: Project Grant - PA: HIV/AIDS and STBBI Multi-Year Grant

The global burden of HIV/AIDS remains one of the greatest scientific and public health challenges of our time, with more people infected with HIV today across the globe than the entire population of Canada. Progress in this field requires a better understanding of HIV infection and spread. Indeed, we still lack a complete understanding of where the virus hides once it establishes life-long infection, how the virus interacts with different human immune cells, and how best to eliminate viruses to achieve a cure. This proposal reveals how the surface of HIV viruses can be decorated with a variety of human immune proteins, resulting in a 'protein fingerprint' on the virus surface that can yield new and important clues as to where the virus is hiding. This protein fingerprint also gives the virus additional biological properties, such as altered homing in the body and attachment to different immune cell types. To study this protein fingerprint on viruses, we are using novel experimental methods in flow virometry that were uniquely developed in my lab. We plan to identify the biological impact of newly discovered human proteins on the viral surface by testing for changes in virus binding and infection when these proteins are present/absent. Since our unique methods will enable us to identify new human proteins on the surface of HIV viruses, this work could also guide the development of more effective treatments and/or vaccine designs that consider both human and viral proteins present on the virus surface. Furthermore, our research provides new technical tools that could be easily applied to studies on other viruses, including pandemic respiratory viruses, like influenza and coronaviruses.