CLEVELAND, Ohio — Case Western Reserve University’s dental school will use a $9.5 million grant to research why some HIV drugs increase problems in the mouth.
The grant is important for the school because of its significance and its size. The School of Dental Medicine has spent the last decade rebuilding its research program, and this grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research is the largest in the school’s 117-year history, according to a press release from the school.
“This reinforces our research endeavors and gives us a leg up to attract really good talent,” said Aaron Weinberg, professor and chair of the biological sciences department at the CWRU School of Dental Medicine.
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The dental school hadn’t received more than $3 million in NIH grants at any time this decade, according to annual reports from the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research. With this grant, 22 researchers – mostly from CWRU with about a half-dozen from other institutions – will try to determine why highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) for HIV patients increases their oral complications. For example, patients who use these anti-retrovirals have a four-times-higher rate of contracting human papillomavirus (HPV).
Weinberg said the drugs seem to be altering the human body’s innate immunity, a basic first-line of defense against infections around mucus-secreting areas of the body. Through the grant, researchers hope to unlock the problems in the mouth and then expand to other areas that also seem affected by the drugs, including salivary glands and cervical areas. They hope to potentially apply their lessons to the cancers that appear after HPV, and examine overall the way people are susceptible to mucosal-based diseases.
“The dysfunction we’re seeing has a lot of potential insights into other parts of the body,” Weinberg said.
The dental school’s research strength crumbled in the early 1990s when a financial restructuring shuttered, among other things, the school’s oral biology department. CWRU renewed its efforts in the late ’90s and started a biological sciences department in 2003. The dental school had as little as $460,000 in annual funding in 2002 from the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research, according to annual reports. Since then, the funding was as high as $2.6 million until this grant.
Weinberg said the grant would help attract additional NIH funding as well as increase the research reputation of the school. In addition to the research, the grant funds an annual symposium, a monthly guest lectureship, a career development program for faculty, and training for students and postdoctoral fellows.
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The grant also draws on talent in both the dental and medical schools, leveraging some of the campus’ best minds in the areas of AIDS research and the study of personalized medicine. That talent includes Mark Chance, director of the Case Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics, and Michael Lederman, the co-director for the Center for AIDS Research.
[CWRU photo courtesy of Flickr user Charles Burkett]
