The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will lead a national research effort to find a cure for HIV with the support of a new $32 million federal grant.
The five-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, will be administered by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute at UNC and will be shared among researchers at nine U.S. universities that have all done key HIV research. The National Institute of Mental Health is co-funding the research.
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UNC is the lead research institution in a collaboration of 19 investigators across the country who aim to develop a way to purge the virus hiding in the immune systems of patients taking antiretroviral therapy.
Previous HIV-funding initiatives focused on prevention and vaccine development. While antiretroviral drugs help patients infected with HIV effectively control virus levels, UNC said that the virus is never fully eliminated from infected cells and tissues. Researchers will work to better understand where these reservoirs of HIV are located, how they are established and maintained, and how to eliminate them.
Dr. David Margolis, UNC School of Medicine professor of medicine and microbiology, and principal investigator of the HIV research effort, said in a statement that the funding shows that the National Institutes of Health and the scientific community believe “finding a cure for AIDS is a realistic goal and should be part of our plan of attack against the epidemic.”
The UNC-led research group is one of three such groups funded by NIAID under its Martin Delaney Collaboratory initiative. Delaney, who died in 2009, was a widely known AIDS activist who championed the concept of accelerating progress toward a cure for HIV infection through a public-private partnership that involves government, academia and industry. The UNC-led collaboration will have Merck (NYSE:MRK) as its industry partner. Merck has done research on drugs and other therapies that target viral reservoirs. Merck will not receive federal funds for its contributions to the UNC-led research.
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The 19 investigators in the UNC-led research come from Case Western Reserve University, Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Davis, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-San Diego, University of California-San Francisco, The Gladstone Institute, University of Minnesota and the University of Utah.