- Novel strategies/approaches for preventing the establishment of, or eliminating, viral reservoirs
- Understanding and characterizing cellular and tissue locations of reservoirs and their relative importance in maintaining infection in the face of ART and the immune system
- Understanding the extent to which persistence is due to true latency versus low level replication. How does the effect of ART differ in each case?
- Is there a threshold viral load below which infection will not be re-seeded?
- Studies in elite controllers and/or acute (i.e. the absence of antibody positivity) infection cohorts that may help define new mechanisms of persistence that are not HLA-driven.
- Does persistent immune activation point to a need for long-term immune reconstitution strategies? Are there benefits to immune therapy?
- Improved assays to quantify integrated versus unintegrated DNA, or characterize replication competence. Do these differ between tissues, in patients treated during acute versus chronic infection, or in progressors versus controllers?
- Improved assays to more efficiently and inexpensively measure extremely low viral load (e.g., to 0.01 copies/ml) or (changes in) the size of the persistent reservoir.
- Deep sequencing approaches to compare viruses in different tissue compartments with those in plasma following treatment interruption, with a view to identifying sources of viral rebound
- What are the consequences of chronic immune activation, in the presence or absence of ART, on tissues such as the gut, and can the damage be reversed if immune activation is controlled?
Act fast! The deadline is 25 October 2011. The grant is worth 250,000 USD over two years
See the link for more information.
