The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it has awarded three grants named in honor of Project Inform’s founder, Martin Delaney, totaling $14 million per-year for up to five years to focus on HIV eradication efforts.
The Martin Delaney Collaboratory was formed by Anthony Fauci—the head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a great friend of Delaney’s—and his colleagues, to foster public/private partnerships in hopes of finding a cure for the HIV.Â
The awards during this first funding cycle will go to three groups, all of whom are working with pharmaceutical companies to explore the potential of early phase compounds to either help the body eradicate the virus or to control it naturally.
One of the awards will go to David Margolis, MD, at the University of North Carolina (UNC), who will work with researchers at Merck Laboratories on compounds to purge the reservoir of currently unreachable HIV from the body.
A second group will be led by Steven Deeks, MD, and Michael McCune, MD, PhD, from the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) and Rafick-Pierre Sekaly, PhD, from the Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute of Florida (VGTI ) in Port St. Lucie. Deeks, McCune and Sekaly will also work with Merck on efforts to perturb the latent reservoir of HIV without broadly activating the immune system.
A third group, led by Keith Jerome, MD, PhD, and Hans-Peter Kiem, MD, from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle will combine forces with the biotechnology company Sangamo Biosciences to develop proteins that can directly attack latent cells and train immune cells to be naturally resistant to HIV infection.
“I know that Marty would be pleased by these awards,” said David Evans, Project Inform’s Director of Research Advocacy and a long-time activist. “Marty’s dream, and something he pressed particularly hard for before his death in 2009, was to convince the scientific community not to give up on the possibility of a cure for HIV. These grants go to honored and respected scientists who believed in a cure when others did not and who were all personally inspired by Marty’s tireless work on behalf of people with HIV.”
In April 2011, Project Inform cosponsored a think tank meeting with researchers, regulators, industry and community advocates to identify and address key factors that are hindering research towards a cure. Significant progress was made, with key action items identified in several areas to streamline the process of bringing promising treatments into the clinic. A report on the conference will be published in the late summer.