amfAR Gives $2.15M in Grants to "Countdown for a Cure"

As part of their new research initiative "Countdown to a Cure for HIV/AIDS," which aims to find a cure for HIV by 2020, amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, announced their inaugural round of research grants. The 12 awards total $2.15 million -- the largest sum ever disbursed by amfAR in a single round of awards -- and support researchers from San Francisco to Chicago to Barcelona to Sydney.

"The scientific challenges to a cure for HIV have been illuminated, and with the right investments, these challenges can be overcome," said amfAR CEO Kevin Robert Frost. "That's the philosophy behind amfAR's 'Countdown to a Cure,' and these new grants represent our strengthened commitment to high-impact, smarter research that will accelerate our progress toward a cure."

The grants will allow researchers to tackle the four remaining roadblocks to a cure: charting the precise locations of the reservoirs; understanding how persistent HIV reservoirs are established and maintained; recording how much virus they hold; and eliminating these reservoirs.

In light of the first documented case of a child cured of HIV (funded by amfAR), Nancy Haigwood and colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland will test the ability of antibodies to limit the formation of the viral reservoir in infants, potentially leading to new directions for therapy among HIV-positive newborns. In a study that could inform our understanding of how and when the reservoir is established, Haigwood's team will test in infant macaques the effects of antibodies found to be effective in controlling HIV in humans.

At the University of California, San Francisco, Hiroyu Hatano, M.D. and colleagues will recruit subjects from ongoing studies of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis). Because these study participants are frequently tested for HIV, Hatano believes her team will be able to identify subjects in the first couple of weeks of infection, when the viral reservoirs are established. This will allow the researchers to discover which cells HIV infects at various stages during acute infection, and how very early treatment might affect the size or distribution of the reservoir.

Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the University of Toronto led by Mario Ostrowski, M.D., is pursuing an entirely different strategy: therapeutic vaccination. Ostrowski and colleagues will conduct a small pilot clinical trial of a therapeutic vaccine to determine whether it can reduce the size of the reservoir. The vaccine will be tested in subjects who started antiretroviral therapy within six months of acquiring HIV and is intended to induce cellular immunity, one arm of the immune system responsible for killing cells that are infected with the virus.

"Our scientific reviewers were unanimous in praising the caliber of research proposals submitted in this round of awards," said Dr. Rowena Johnston, amfAR vice president and director of research. "Our job is to explore as many routes as possible to get to a broadly applicable cure, and that means equipping scientists around the world with the resources they need to help us achieve our goal sooner rather than later."

amfAR is one of the world's leading nonprofit organizations dedicated to the support of AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and the advocacy of sound AIDS-related public policy. Since 1985, amfAR has invested more than $388 million in its programs and has awarded more than 3,300 grants to research teams worldwide.

For a complete list of the amfAR-funded researchers and their projects, visit http://www.amfar.org/New-Cure-Focused-Grants-Total-More-Than-2-15-million/.text