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Albany Med Scientist Receives Grant for Research that Could Help Battle HIV

Albany, N.Y., June 27, 2007- Right now, according to United Nations estimates, some 42 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS, and every day, approximately 11,000 new cases are diagnosed and 8,500 people die from the disease.

Carlos de Noronha, Sc.D., assistant professor in the Center for Immunology and Microbial Disease at Albany Medical College, would like to do something about that. He recently received a $1.4 million, four-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for research entitled "Vpr as a Mediator of Proteasomal Degradation."

According to Dr. de Noronha, "The HIV virus produces about 15 proteins. There is a handful that we don?t know what they do, and Vpr is one of them. At the same time, we find Vpr is produced within all HIV patients. That leads us to believe that Vpr is pretty important."

He adds, "We know that when HIV gets into the body, it wants to do two things: hide out from the immune system and then destroy the immune system. So here is the huge question: what is the target of Vpr? If we can find out, perhaps we can help put a stop to HIV/AIDS."

The HIV virus is supremely tricky, adds Dr. de Noronha. Like a spam e-mailer who keeps changing the spelling of key words so they will slip through anti-spam software, the HIV virus keeps changing the way it can slip through some of the body's defenses.

Researchers already know some key things about Vpr. If you cut Vpr out of the HIV virus, the virus is impaired in infecting some non-dividing cells called macrophages which are an important part of the immune system. In addition, if you put Vpr into cells that are dividing, they stop dividing after all the chromosomes have been duplicated.

In their research, Dr. de Noronha and his colleagues found a way to produce Vpr at higher levels in cells. They then purified it and identified the proteins that attach to Vpr. Two are part of a complex - called ubiquitin ligase - that targets proteins within a cell for destruction.

"We have a couple of hypotheses," Dr. de Noronha says. "One is the idea that Vpr may cause anti-viral proteins within the cells to be destroyed and therefore impair the cell's defenses. Another possibility is that when Vpr interferes with cells dividing, that may create a better environment for hosting viruses."

The bottom line for Dr. de Noronha is this: "The more we know about every single part of the HIV virus, the better we will be able to combat the virus as a whole."

Albany Medical Center is northeastern New York's only academic health sciences center. It consists of Albany Medical College, Albany Medical Center Hospital and the Albany Medical Center Foundation, Inc.