amfAR Awards Boost Aspiring HIV Researchers

amfAR recently announced new funding for four talented young researchers to support innovative strategies targeting HIV.

Named in honor of amfAR’s founding chairman, the Mathilde Krim Fellowships in Biomedical Research offer a lifeline to early-career investigators selected through a rigorous peer-review process, providing $180,000 over two years with the possibility of an additional $50,000 for Phase II support. The increasingly competitive funding environment for aspiring postdoctoral scientists was reflected by an exceptionally high level of interest among applicants.

“Young researchers infuse the field of HIV research with fresh energy and bold and creative ideas, and our Mathilde Krim Fellowships offer an increasingly rare and critically important source of support for the best and brightest,” amfAR Chief Executive Officer Kevin Robert Frost said. “The Fellowships are a central component of amfAR’s unique research funding model, which continually rewards and advances innovation.”   

A study by Francisco Zapatero Belinchon, PhD, of the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, shows amfAR’s willingness to support bold ideas that might be considered too “high risk” by other grant makers. While antiretroviral therapy stops HIV from replicating, it cannot eradicate the hidden reservoir of dormant virus, the main barrier to a cure. Cure researchers have largely focused on waking up dormant virus so that it can be targeted by the immune system, but Dr. Zapatero Belinchon proposes a less conventional “block and lock” approach that aims to lock HIV into a silent state indefinitely, preventing it from ever reactivating. He will use a powerful new tool called “BrecOFF” that combines a protein called Brec1 that finds the part of the genome where HIV hides with “molecular silencers” that shut down HIV activity by modifying how DNA is packaged.

Tianling Ou, PhD, of MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute, proposes a brand-new and extremely promising strategy for solving one of HIV vaccine research’s greatest puzzles: how to guide the immune system to mount a powerful response to HIV from the outset. Dr. Ou will use a specialized mouse model to test whether HIV-fighting antibodies produced early in the course of infection can be nudged into becoming much more potent broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) through a series of carefully timed interventions. If successful, the study could provide a pathway to developing protection against HIV using its own immune machinery.

Hannah King, PhD, of the Peter Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia, aims to harness the power of checkpoint inhibitors, used successfully in cancer treatment, to reinvigorate exhausted HIV-fighting T cells. To date, this approach has produced inconsistent results. Using cutting-edge single-cell analysis, Dr. King will identify patterns among samples from previous clinical trials to predict who will respond best to this treatment. The goal is to find immune markers or gene signatures that act like fingerprints for a successful response. These insights could make checkpoint therapy safer and more effective for people with HIV and help refine future cure strategies.

Finally, a study by Elizabeth Hastie, MD, of the University of California, San Diego, could integrate gender-affirming care into HIV cure research, addressing an urgent gap in knowledge for a community heavily impacted by HIV: transgender women. Dr. Hastie will examine the impact of hormone therapy, specifically estrogen, on the immune system of transgender women living with HIV. Studies suggest estrogen may influence how certain immune cells respond to the virus, potentially helping control it more effectively. Dr. Hastie hopes to understand whether hormone therapy can enhance antiviral immunity or even reshape HIV’s ability to persist in the body.

“These four new Fellows gained high marks from our reviewers for their ingenuity and their well-designed and varied approaches to tackling HIV,” amfAR’s Director of Research Dr. Andrea Gramatica said. “With close to $1 billion in recent cuts to HIV research at the National Institutes of Health, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of amfAR’s research grants and fellowships in helping end the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.”

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