April 4, 2014
Angela Kashuba, PharmD, the John A. and Deborah S. McNeil, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been awarded $4.4 million over five years by the National Institutes of Health to study drug penetration in the tissues where the HIV virus lingers.
The award is one of two grants totaling approximately $7 million made to UNC researchers to help develop treatments that target HIV reservoirs, the single most important obstacle to eradicating HIV from the body.
Despite powerful and life-saving drug treatments, HIV continues to replicate at low levels in the body. Infected cells remain, and once treatment stops, the virus quickly rebounds. The infected cells are called residual active viral reservoirs or persistent reservoirs.
The HIV reservoir may be a consequence of reduced drug penetration into certain tissues and cells. In order to develop and select treatments that will suppress the virus in all tissues and to help inform the work being done to cure HIV, Kashuba and her laboratory will identify which drugs get into tissues best and what mechanisms they use to do so.
J. Victor Garcia, PhD, professor in the UNC School of Medicine, has also been awarded $2.4 million over five years to develop and implement an innovative, reproducible and flexible experimental platform for testing and evaluating new protocols to eradicate the residual active HIV reservoir. Humanized bone marrow-liver-thymus (or BLT) mice developed in the Garcia laboratory have previously been validated for the study of HIV latency and persistence. With this grant, Garcia and his team will further characterize and address fundamental questions about the nature of the active reservoir in tissues.
Together, Kashuba’s and Garcia’s research will fill critical gaps in our knowledge of the persistent reservoir and may inform future clinical studies aimed at finding a cure for HIV/AIDS.
Kashuba and Garcia are members of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, as well as the the UNC-led Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication and the UNC Center for AIDS Research, where Kashuba directs the Clinical Pharmacology and Analytical Chemistry Core.
The funding, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, part of the National Institutes of Health, is designated to support new ideas for eliminating the cellular reservoirs of HIV that continue to produce virus despite treatment with antiretroviral therapy. UNC, which is home to one of the largest HIV cure initiatives in the world, has received two awards through this funding mechanism.
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