Health sciences professors to help advance HIV cure research with NIH funding

By Allen Tung

Nearly 37 million people in the world live with HIV/AIDS and, since its discovery, 39 million have died. To date, researchers have been unable to find a cure.

SFU health sciences professors Zabrina Brumme and Mark Brockman are hoping to help change that thanks to funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

They are part of a new global collaboration, called Bench to Bed Enhanced Lymphocyte Infusions to Engineer Viral Eradication (BELIEVE), devoted to finding a cure for HIV. The National Institutes of Health is funding the initiative with a five-year grant totaling $28 million (U.S).

BELIEVE is led by physician Dr. Douglas Nixon, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. It comprises 18 international university centres and two private companies.

Zabrina and Mark, who are also B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS associates, will lead research in their joint lab at SFU that will help to address the host and viral determinants necessary for mounting an effective antiviral immune response.

Currently, the key barrier to developing a cure for HIV is the virus’s ability to establish a “latent” or silent infection that existing drugs cannot eliminate.

“Some progress has been made recently to identify new drugs that can wake these latent infections up, but the virus is still not removed because the host immune response to HIV is not effective,” says Mark, who is a Canada Research Chair Tier II in Viral Pathogenesis and Immunity.

“This is due to a combination of factors, including immune evasion strategies developed by the virus, such as sequence adaptation and a general weakening of the immune system caused by long-term infections.”

Rather than using drugs to eliminate the latent HIV, BELIEVE aims to harness the host immune system for a cure, which requires new strategies to make the system’s natural response to infection more effective.

Zabrina, who is a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar, will examine the sequence of latent HIV to identify the most effective targets for the host immune system. This strategy aims to overcome viral sequence diversity and HIV’s ability to evade host immunity by adapting its sequence to that of its host.

Mark will study the natural immune response to HIV to identify T-cell populations that can recognize these more effective viral targets. T-cells are a type of white blood cell that fights viruses in the body.

Of the 18 international medical institutions involved in BELIEVE, three are from Canada: SFU, the University of Toronto, the Maple Leaf Medical Clinic in Toronto. Toronto-based community advocate Robert Reinhard is also a member.

Says Zabrina: “By bringing together scientists, clinicians and community members from diverse institutions and settings, we have the opportunity to not only develop new strategies to cure HIV, but to also make sure that these approaches are accessible and appropriate to individuals and populations who have the greatest need globally."