amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research announced four new grants to leading researchers from around the world in the Foundation’s most competitive round of HIV cure grants to date.
Each grant will provide significant support over two years to teams working on cure-focused research at the California Institute of Technology; Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland; Ghent University Hospital in Ghent, Belgium; and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
One project is led by Dr. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor at Caltech who is directing his attention and efforts toward curing HIV. Dr. Baltimore was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of reverse transcriptase, which enabled the development of reverse transcriptase inhibitors drugs that form the cornerstone of HIV treatment today. His amfAR-funded project seeks to address an enduring controversy in the cure field: whether, and how, HIV continues to replicate even when a patient has an undetectable viral load. The answer to this question will fundamentally determine which processes and parts of the anatomy must be targeted to cure HIV infection.