CLEVELAND, Ohio — A $3 million grant to two research centers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine could lead to better treatments for the HIV/AIDS virus.
The Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics, and the Case Center for AIDS Research have received the first installment of the grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) — $989,108.
The centers have been approved to receive a total of roughly $3 million over the next three years from the National Institutes of Health unit.
The grant would enable the proteomics and bioinformatics center to expand its HIV/AIDS research, which already represents 30 percent of its work. For the AIDS center, it’s a chance to add advanced proteomics technology to its portfolio.
Proteomics is the study of proteins, particularly their structure and systems, which is the foundation of personalized medicine.
“The NIDA grant is really a big breakthrough for the medical school,” said Mark Chance, director for the proteomics center and primary investigator on the grant.
Though the Case Center for AIDS Research is world-renowned, Greater Cleveland has received few grant dollars from the drug abuse institute, which has a big HIV/AIDS research component, Chance said.
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“And so it was a logical fit to try to find a way to get our HIV researchers more involved at looking at the complications or the additional burden that former and current drug use has for AIDS patients,” he said.
The researchers will use the money to study how proteins in the bodies of HIV/AIDS patients may have been altered by current or past drug abuse, making the virus that much harder on them.
“There is a pressing need to obtain objective measurements of how HIV disease progresses and to investigate whether drug abuse alters the course of HIV disease,” Jonathan Karn, chair of the Department of Molecular Biology & Microbiology at Case and director of the Case Center for AIDS Research, said in a written statement.
The researchers hypothesize that the drugs damage the immune system, Chance said. Because the HIV/AIDS virus also damages the immune system, the two together could lead to worse medical outcomes for patients.
If the researchers could understand how the immune system damage occurs, they might be able to point the way to more effective therapies for patients, Chance said.
One of the strengths of the researchers’ grant proposal was a committed group of about 1,000 HIV/AIDS patients in Cleveland, he said. “They’re involved in the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit and Center for AIDS Research, they volunteer to be part of these studies and … come back again and again, receive treatment, donate blood.”
Blood and other samples from the volunteers will be the starting point for researchers on the drug abuse project.
HIV/AIDS research already accounts for about one-third –$20 million — of the grants received by researchers at the proteomics and bioinformatics center, Chance said.
The research is a collaboration among researchers at 37 departments and divisions at the university, as well as at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, the Cleveland Clinic, MetroHealth Medical Center and the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, he said.
The proteomics center also is working on a project to use proteins to develop a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. “That would be the silver bullet for AIDS in areas where even very expensive drugs are just not feasible,” Chance said.
