July 11, 2011
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been awarded a five-year, $32 million federal grant to develop ways to cure people with HIV by purging the virus hiding in the immune systems of patients taking antiretroviral therapy. Tackling this latent virus is considered key to a cure for AIDS.
Angela Kashuba, PharmD, will direct the preclinical and clinical pharmacology studies as director of the project’s clinical pharmacology core. Kashuba is director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research Clinical Pharmacology and Analytic Chemistry Core and an associate professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics.
Although individuals infected with HIV may effectively control virus levels with antiretroviral drugs and maintain relatively good health, the virus is never fully eliminated from the cells and tissues it has infected. Researchers need to better understand where these reservoirs of HIV are located, how they are established and maintained, and how to eliminate them.
“This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of HIV infection,” Kashuba says. “I believe one of the greatest successes in medicine in this past century has been the ability of antiretroviral therapy to turn this deadly disease into a chronic infection. Yet the fact that we do not have an effective vaccine demonstrates how complex this virus is.”
Previous HIV funding initiatives have focused on prevention and vaccine development.
“This is the first major funding initiative ever to focus on HIV eradication, and we at UNC are excited to lead this important effort,” says David Margolis, MD, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology in the UNC School of Medicine and principal investigator of this effort. “With this funding, the NIH and the scientific community are saying that finding a cure for AIDS is a realistic goal and should be part of our plan of attack against the epidemic.”
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant will be administered by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute at UNC and will be shared among researchers at nine U.S. universities, all of them pioneering researchers in HIV latency. Cofunding is also being provided by the National Institute of Mental Health .
The UNC-led consortium will be one of three groups funded by NIAID under its Martin Delaney Collaboratory initiative.The UNC-led effort will undertake more than a dozen research projects to discover how the virus can remain dormant and virtually invisible, identify drugs and treatments capable of ridding the body of persistent infection and evaluate these new strategies in relevant animal models so that they can be translated into people.
“I am very optimistic about being able to find a functional cure,” Kashuba says. “The collaboration that will occur within this grant this is a great strength and results in a program as a whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts. The exchange of information, technology, and potential products between these investigators and institutions is unprecedented. This is the right time to pursue such an initiative.
The collaboratory also includes an important industrial partner: Merck Research Laboratories in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Merck has an outstanding track record in the development of small molecule drugs and other therapies that target viral reservoirs. Merck Research Laboratories will be receiving no federal funds for their contribution to this research.
“This partnering of academia and industry, preclinical and clinical pharmacology, brings strengths and synergies to the collaboratory that wouldn’t be accomplished otherwise,” Kashuba says.
The pharmacology core Kashuba directs is composed of highly skilled analytical scientists within the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, including Craig Sykes, MS, and Nicole White. Julie Dumond, PharmD, a research assistant professor in DPET, will support the pharmacometric activities within the core.
The other universities involved in the UNC-led collaboratory are Case Western Reserve University; Johns Hopkins University; University of California, Davis; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Diego; the Gladstone Institute; University of California, San Francisco; University of Minnesota, and the University of Utah.
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