Help find a cure for HIV/AIDS

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your support. April was an exciting month for AIDS Research Alliance and for the HIV/AIDS scientific community. As we competed for a permanent spot on GlobalGiving.org – to raise awareness and resources for our HIV/AIDS research worldwide - UCLA had a medical breakthrough.

As you might recall from April news headlines, UCLA scientists reported that they were able to manipulate hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs, found in bone marrow) to generate a population of HIV-specific immune cells (cytotoxic T lymphocytes, CTLs) that target and kill HIV-infected cells.  By using a mouse model that recapitulates the human immune system, the genetically engineered HSCs differentiated into HIV-specific CTLs and were able to suppress HIV replication when challenged with HIV. These results indicate that modulating the immune response to infection and using a stem cell based gene therapy approach is a promising strategy for targeting chronic infections.

Our research at ARA will also focus on immune modulation; we will use HIV+ patient samples as a source of CTLs, and engineer the CTLs to specifically recognize HIV-infected cells. In collaboration with some of the same researchers at UCLA, we will determine whether the engineered CTLs in combination with prostratin can increase HIV-induced cell death in latently infected cells.

During the GlobalGiving Open Challenge, we asked you to help advance our research by funding an important technology – “leukapheresis” – so that we can gauge how efficiently prostratin activates the hidden virus from an actual infected person. Because of your generosity, AIDS Research Alliance now has access to this important technology.  The funds raised during our April 2012 campaign will allow us to conduct two out of the eight “leukapheresis” procedures, a great start.  This project will be completed when we conduct the remaining six procedures.

Research takes time, perseverance and resources. Donors just like you have supported ARA and helped us accomplish important milestones in our reservoirs eradication research.

• One of our first successes was to prove that prostratin poses no risk of causing cell mutations or tumors;
• Another success was to prove that synthetic prostratin is effective;
• A more recent accomplishment was to outfit a new research laboratory with several pieces of sophisticated equipment in order to advance our research. Now ARA can conduct almost all bench science in-house.

What do you think? We welcome your feedback. Please do not hesitate to contact us at development@aidsresearch.org.

Warmly,

Stephen Brown