HIV

Gero Hütter of Red Cross Germany proposes to use stem cells transplants to cure HIV. He is planning to develop a program that generates a registry of stem cells that lack the CCR5 protein, which is used by HIV to enter into a cell. If successful these adult stem cells could be transplanted into a HIV patient and effectively "cure" HIV.

Daniel Kavanagh of Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. proposes to use a novel class of molecular probes to identify and characterize individual cells latently infected with HIV. If successful, this project will identify new markers that may be used to target and eliminate HIV-infected cells.

Adam Spivak from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the U.S. will perform a high-throughput screen to identify novel compounds able to selectively induce cell death in chronically HIV-1 infected cells. Understanding the mechanism of action of such compounds will inform efforts to target and eradicate remaining HIV-1 reservoirs in patients receiving antiretroviral therapy.

Steven R. King of the University of Michigan in the U.S. proposes to engineer HIV proteins that can target and destroy HIV in latently infected cells. If successful, these new anti-viral drugs together with conventional treatments could completely clear the virus from people, resulting in a cure for HIV infection.

Gorica Rakleova of Sofia University in Bulgaria proposes to identify and create a library of HIV-1 integrase variants that are capable of removing virus sequences from infected cell genomes. If successful, these variants could be used as new HIV therapies.

Christof von Kalle of Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum/NCT in Germany will study the genomic location and clonal structure of HIV integration sites in host cells. Finding and eliminating these cells could make antiretroviral therapies more effective and increase the survival of infected individuals.

Linos Vandekerckhove of the University Hospital Ghent in Belgium proposes to analyze biomarkers and mRNA transcripts to discover well-defined biomarkers that can be used to assess the extent of the latent HIV reservoir in patients with an undetectable viral load.

Bent Jakobsen of Immunocore Ltd. in the United Kingdom, collaborating with Cardiff and Oxford Universities, will test whether a novel biologic therapy, engineered from immune cells, can clear virus from latently-infected HIV cells. If successful, the HIV-infected patients could control the disease without retroviral drugs.

Alessandro Ripalti of Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Bologna S.Orsola-Malpighi in Italy will attempt to produce an engineered HIV integrase, an enzyme produced by the virus to integrate itself into host chromosomes, and test its ability to instead cut the virus' DNA at its integration sites in the human genome.

Patrick Kiser of the University of Utah in the U.S. will design a vaginal gel that blocks HIV by becoming impermeable in response to the pH change induced by the presence of semen, and includes a polymer engineered to bind to HIV surface proteins to halt viral transport to susceptible tissues and HIV target cells. In this project's Phase I research, Kiser and his team engineered a synthetic polymer that has many of the properties of mucus, and demonstrated that the polymers slow or stops the movement of cells in the presence of semen.