CLEVELAND, Ohio — Jonathan Karn wants to turn the AIDS virus against itself.
The molecular biology and microbiology professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine has a won a $3.9 million, five-year Avant-Garde Award for Innovative HIV/AIDS research from the National Institutes of Health. Karn wants to use the money to harness the body’s natural process of turning off the genes in its cells — called “epigenetic silencing” — to keep the AIDS virus from replicating.
That could lead to long-lasting suppression of latent viruses without the use of antiretroviral drug cocktails, which some patients find difficult to manage and pay for over a lifetime, Karn said in his grant proposal. “The need to develop novel therapeutic tools to attack the latently infected population has been widely recognized, but there has been little progress using conventional drug development approaches,” he wrote in the proposal.
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“His proposal would move HIV/AIDS from a chronic condition to one where the virus is [all but] eliminated,” said Jessica Studeny, a spokeswoman for Case Medical School.
Karn is the director of the Center for AIDS Research at Case Medical School, one of only twenty such NIH-supported centers nationwide, Studeny said. Prior to Karn’s grant, the center had an annual grant base of $20 million, she said. For instance, the local AIDS research center is sharing in another $3 million grant from the NIH jointly awarded in May to the Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics at the medical school.
Karn plans to more than double the size of his eight-person research group through the grant, which comes from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Studeny said.
Avant-Garde awards are intended to “stimulate high-impact research that may lead to groundbreaking opportunities for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in drug abusers,” according to a statement by the national institute. Winning scientists receive $500,000 per year, plus facilities and administrative costs, for five years to support their research, the institute said as it announced four winners of its annual competition.
