A multi-institutional team headed by John Young, Ph.D., a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Sumit Chanda, Ph.D., an associate professor at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, has been awarded a $21 million Program Project Grant to dissect the early innate immune response to HIV infection using a systems biology approach.

The project will bring together a multidisciplinary team that draws on the expertise of 13 research groups at seven institutions to uncover the cellular protein machinery that represents the first line of defense against HIV, the cause of AIDS.

The team working on this grant wants to understand how the innate immune system functions as a whole, with the goal of building accurate mathematical and experimental models that can ultimately be used to inform vaccine design and used to predict which cellular factors represent new targets for antiviral therapies.

This grant funds a multi-center consortium that will integrate cutting edge technologies in systems biology and next generation sequencing, with world-leading expertise in immunology and virology to decode and model the early molecular events that occur after HIV enters the body. These projects will be fundamental towards the development of safe and effective HIV vaccines, as well as novel preventative therapies for HIV.

Participating researchers:

Salk Institute for Biological Studies
John Young (Principal Investigator/Program Director)

Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute
Sumit Chanda (Program Deputy Director)
John Reed                     Renate König

University of California, San Francisco
Nevan Krogan

Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Adolfo García-Sastre       Ana Fernandez-Sesma
Viviana Simon

University of California, San Diego
Alexander Hoffmann          Michael David
Leor Weinberger

Northwestern University
Steven Wolinsky

University of Pennsylvania
Frederic Bushman