While current treatment is not very effective, the President's Cabinet Award has allowed the investigators to obtain critical basic data required for further study. Intermediate benefits will be to aid the investigators in acquiring research grants from other sources to continue the work, which will lead to research contracts from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Tissue Compartments David Asmuth, M.D. Internal Medicine-Infectious Diseases Combination therapy with new agents against HIV is capable of reducing virus in the plasma to below levels of detection. However, reservoirs of viral replication persist, largely in lymph nodes tissue that potentially reignite HIV replication. Nineteen patients have taken part in the study through lymph node biopsy procedures.
Further research is currently in progress.
One NIH grant has been submitted and a second is in process. Both grants are based directly on data obtained from work funded by the President's Cabinet Award. Additionally, due to the development of the structure for obtaining excision lymph node biopsies on HIV infected patients, the AIDS Clinical Trial Unit will be able to enroll patients in those sub-studies of protocols that call for this procedure. The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Sealy Center for Structural Biology have collaborated to create a Research Listserv for the UTMB research community. The System is an e-mail communication link among researchers from multiple disciplines who otherwise would not have the opportunity to discover all of the materials and intellectual resources available to them on the campus.