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| |  Researchers Get NIH Grant to Study Acute Infection and Early HIV Disease SAN FRANCISCO -- July 9, 1997 -- Researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) have received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, for a period of four years to focus on new and innovative ways to study how infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes disease in adults. The grant will be for $1 million each year for a total of $4 million. The new program will study acute and early infection with HIV, looking at how the virus causes disease in the very beginning of infection, how it affects the immune system, and what treatments have an effect on the amount of virus in the body and on strengthening the immune system early in the infection cycle to assure a long-term healthy state. The research effort will include both basic and clinical work and will be called the Acute Infection and Early Disease Research Program. The principal investigator from UCSF is Jay A. Levy, MD, professor of medicine, one of the first researchers to discover the cause of AIDS, the virus that has come to be identified as HIV. "The primary thrust of the UCSF effort will be to study early HIV pathogenesis with a focus on the amount of virus in the blood and lymph tissues during acute infection and how the immune system responds against this virus," said Levy. "Various treatments will be offered early in the infection for those who decide to receive them. We can then determine if early therapy helps and what effect treatment has on the virus, the immune response and the clinical course." The UCSF study will evaluate the effect of therapy on: viral load, the rate at which the virus is produced, immune activation, and CD8+ T cell function. "These studies will provide insights into the pathogenesis of HIV infection and contribute to the development of new approaches for treatment," Levy said. The new program has already begun recruiting participants. Persons interested in participating are asked to call the Options Project at San Francisco General Hospital. The Options Project, opened in July 1996, is a treatment program for persons who have been infected with HIV for less than six months. The early intervention program is dedicated to attacking the virus in the initial phase of infection in the hope that the new therapies that are now available will be most successful when used early. The Options Project also has several other research studies available for persons with early HIV infection. The number to call for the Acute Infection and Early Disease Research Program and for information about other studies is 415/502-8100. "The award of this grant represents the first achievement of the newly-created AIDS Research Institute (ARI) and reflects the cooperation and collaboration of many investigators from the several UCSF campuses with different areas of expertise," said Thomas Coates, PhD, UCSF professor of medicine and epidemiology and director of the ARI. "We are hopeful that this accomplishment is the first of many future successes by the ARI for these multidisciplinary approaches to find a solution to HIV and AIDS." Five other institutions also received funding from NIAID. They are the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, and the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Levy's basic HIV research at UCSF has been supported since 1983 in part by funding from the University of California University-wide AIDS Research Project.
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