Grant: Catalyst Grant: Innovation in HIV Vaccine and HIV Cure Research

Driven by fundamental research, treatments to improve patient care for HIV infected people have improved immensely since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. HIV/AIDS remains, however, without a cure and killed an estimated 1.8 million people in 2010. Problems of antiviral drug access world wide, serious side effects, drug resistance and cost to society make it an important goal to find a cure for HIV/AIDS. Based on all the available evidence, a broad consensus of scientists agree that a major obstacle to finding a cure for HIV is its ability to establish a dormant infection. Dormant HIV inserts itself into the DNA genome of patient cells and is then hidden from the immune system and cannot be affected by currently available drugs. Our laboratory studies what can be considered the cellular key that is hijacked by HIV to open its lock and exit from dormancy. Here we propose to use cutting-edge protein identification technology to identify all of the proteins that form the key of the lock. Once we have identified host cell proteins that specifically control HIV we will then study in detail the action of proteins on HIV latency in cultured human T cells since these are the cells of our body that are primarily infected by the AIDS virus. The information we learn has a high potential to translate into new drug targets to force HIV from its hiding and then kill it with currently available drugs or immune therapy.