Support from a New York-based group of parents has paved the way for a much larger grant that could lead to promising new treatment targets for AIDS. Concerned Parents for AIDS Research, some of whose members have lost children to AIDS, contributed $250,000 to the Emory Vaccine Center. Because of the research resulting from that initial gift, the National Institutes of Health has awarded Emory and its collaborators at Harvard University a $13 million, five-year project grant.
Led by Rafi Ahmed (pictured above), a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, the Emory Vaccine Center is one of the world’s largest academic vaccine centers. The parents’ seed grant made it possible for Ahmed's laboratory to collaborate with Harvard on studies of a protein that inhibits the immune response to chronic infectious diseases like HIV.
Two years ago scientists at Emory and Harvard made the exciting discovery that the immune inhibitor protein PD-1 (Programmed Death-1) helps switch off the immune response to chronic infectious diseases. This results in apparent “exhaustion” of the T-cell response.
The NIH grant, awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will allow the research team to focus on PD-1 and its specific role in HIV and other chronic viral infections. They plan to identify new targets and pathways and possible drugs that could aim for this molecular trigger, turn off the PD-1 protein, reactivate the immune response, and possibly clear HIV infection.
“Emory put together amazing teams to leverage our private funding,” says Dr. Andrew Lipschitz, medical director of Concerned Parents for AIDS Research. He believes that success in stopping AIDS depends on sharing ideas, technology, and costs.
“CPFA’s goal was to bring together great scientists at two great universities,” he says. “Our initial grant made sense because Emory had certain techniques and equipment that Harvard did not and vice versa. Duplicating machinery and planning would have been very expensive. By sharing their ideas and technology, Emory and Harvard were able to increase their understanding of PD-1 and qualify for this NIH grant, which will enable collaboration with many other major institutions and help scientists move more quickly toward finding treatments and cures for HIV.”
With the NIH grant, the research team now includes scientists from Emory, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, New York University, the University of Montreal and the University of Pennsylvania.
“This collaborative grant, which includes an outstanding team of investigators, provides us a fantastic opportunity to investigate the unique properties of this PD-1 pathway that inhibits the immune response and impacts our defense against deadly infectious diseases,” says project leader Ahmed. “Our work also has clear implications for the treatment of tumors and autoimmune diseases and for increasing the success of transplantation.”
