All work in my section began in February 2017, so there are no CCR-based accomplishments to report yet. However, we have recruited a shared MD/PhD student through the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars program, and he will begin work on this topic in August. As this represents a collaborative project between two laboratories, we have begun preparations at two fronts: 1) technology acquisition and pilot testing, and 2) biochemical reagent acquisition and pilot testing. Initial experiments have been performed using reagents to silence cellular factors already known to contribute favorably or unfavorably to HIV infection at the cell fusion step, for the purpose of validating the global approach.
