A new, five-year, $3.59M grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was awarded to Principal Investigator Serena Spudich, MD, Gilbert Glaser Professor of Neurology at Yale, along with co-PI, Joshua Cyktor, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh.
The R01MH125737 grant is titled “CNS Viral Persistence and Neuropsychiatric Perturbations in HIV: Single cell and molecular interrogation.” Yale investigators supporting this project include: Shelli Farhadian, MD, PhD (Yale, Internal Medicine), Yuval Kluger, PhD (Yale, Pathology), and Rong Fan, PhD (Yale, Biomedical Engineering). External investigators include Leah Rubin, MA, MPH, PhD (Johns Hopkins University, Neurology) and Co-PI Dr. Cyktor and John Mellors, MD (University of Pittsburgh, Infectious Diseases)
Optimizing the cognition and mental health of people living with HIV will require an understanding of the biological connections between these functions and HIV infection in the central nervous system (CNS). In this project, a single cell and molecular examination of the CNS disease profile of people with HIV is proposed over time. Discovery of the mechanism of how HIV impacts the CNS will lead to innovative targeted therapies that could modulate immunological factors or block specific viral effects to improve neurological outcomes even without total elimination of the CNS HIV-1 reservoir.