The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a five-year, $6 million PO1 grant to Biology Chair and Professor Shohreh Amini to continue investigating neurological abnormalities, or injuries, in the central nervous system caused by HIV infection.


The grant is a competitive renewal of a previous five-year, $7 million PO1 grant awarded to Amini in 2002. It will fund three related research projects and two core facilities that she will coordinate and direct. The program project is focused on the signaling pathways involved in HIV-induced neuropathogenesis.


Using viruses as a model system to study central nervous system diseases, Amini and her colleagues hope to unravel molecular mechanisms involved in non-viral-induced neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s.


“Basically, most of these diseases, in some way or another, are related to signal transduction and inflammation and that is what we are trying to determine: what results during inflammation to cause this and what we can do to reverse or prevent it,” Amini said. “So if we use a virus-induced disease as a model, we could get clues as to not only better understand the molecular events involved in the genesis of the disease, but also to design better and safer therapeutics towards these disorders.”


In addition, Amini said project could help locate and define surrogate markers for diseases in the central nervous system induced by HIV infection. Finding those surrogate markers would allow researchers to follow the progression of the disease, and predict such neurological abnormalities as dementia, in a patient.


Amini said that the grant comes at a time when research funding is particularly tight and a lot of researchers are seeing the amounts of their proposed funding requests cut. “NIH did not cut the number of years for this project grant, which was really important.”


Amini also pointed out that the projects funded by the PO1 grant will be a collaboration between the Department of Biology in the College of Science and Technology and investigators at the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurology in the School of Medicine. Between faculty, post docs and research fellows, the grant will support the work of 15-16 researchers over the next five years, she said.