Infectious Disease

Barry Peters of Kings College London will study the balance of tolerizing and stimulating immunity in HIV patients identified as "long-term non-progressors" in an effort to determine whether it is development of tolerance to HIV, and not immunity, which prevents the progression of the disease to AIDS.

To provoke an effective immune response against HIV, George Dickson of Royal Holloway -University of London will utilize HIV-based lentivectors encoded with a strong neutralizing epitope derived from tetanus toxin or influenza on its surface. By forcing production of such highly immunogenic and stable antigens, the immune system will respond with corresponding antibodies and control virus replication.

Anthony Mbonye of the Tropical Disease Research Network in Uganda will assess the feasibility and effectiveness of using private sector midwives to provide HIV testing and antiretroviral drugs in an effort to reduce mother to child transmission of HIV.

Lactobacillus bacteria, typically found in the cervix and vagina of healthy women, have been found to provide a natural barrier against HIV infection. Dr. Leonard Damelin will investigate whether anti-HIV molecules can be introduced via bacteriophages into existing Lactobacillus populations to further fortify this protective barrier.

Jord Stam at Utrecht University in the Netherlands will attempt to create "two-sided" antibodies to fight HIV; one side would attach to HIV, and the other side would safely deposit the virus in cells in which it cannot replicate.

Elijah Songok at the Kenya Medical Research Institute hopes to better understand preliminary findings from studies of sex workers that natural resistance to HIV may be linked to genetic markers for type 2 diabetes.

People born with a natural resistance to the HIV virus have a genetic mutation in the CCR5 gene. Karthikeyan Kandavelou of Pondicherry Biotech Pvt. Ltd. in India will attempt to achieve targeted disruption of CCR5 genes, making an important first step in a new strategy to make people permanently resistant to HIV.

In pursuit of a new type of AIDS vaccine, Zhiwei Chen of the University of Hong Kong will work to use a variant of the primate CCR5 gene as an antigen and test its efficacy in inducing cross-neutralizing antibodies against this important HIV co-receptor.

Dennis Hartigan-O'Connor of the University of California at San Francisco in the U.S. will test whether expanding Th17 cell populations, a subset of CD4 T cells that protect the gastrointestinal tract against microbes, can augment the gut's general defenses and protect against the acute and chronic effects of HIV.

To test the hypothesis that immunization with a non-HIV antigen will neutralize the virus, Jinhua Xiang of the University of Iowa will determine if immunization with an envelope protein of the GB Virus C elicits antibodies that block HIV replication.