University of Utah Gets Grant to Study HIV

University of Utah researchers plan to use a $6.4 million National Institutes of Health grant to study the mechanisms of HIV infection in hopes of finding new ways to combat it. "Our main emphasis is trying to prevent the virus from entering target cells," said Dr. Michael Kay, assistant professor of biochemistry. "We'll also try to prevent HIV from leaving a cell that it has infected." The researchers, four of whom are from the School of Medicine and College of Pharmacy, will collaborate with a colleague at the California Institute of Technology in the five-year effort that they hope will lead to drugs to fight HIV at its foundation. The Utah team, working with researchers from Myriad Genetics, has already discovered that the protein Tsg101 is needed for HIV to escape from cells. "We want to eventually inhibit [the virus] at so many different stages it will be incompatible with survival and propagation," said Kay.

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