Lifelong highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) not only presents formidable problems in terms of patient management, cost and long-term toxicities but also fails to eradicate the virus from infected individuals. HIV persists in the face of HAART due to constitutive low-level replication in sites that are poorly accessible to drugs and the development of latent infections in a variety of types including the long-lived memory CD4+ T cell population, macrophages, and microglial cells in the brain. The need to develop novel therapeutic tools to attack the latently infected population has been widely recognized, but there has been little progress using conventional drug development approaches. Here we propose to develop novel technologies allowing exploitation a natural epigenetic silencing mechanism, DNA methylation, to block HIV transcription. As a prelude to developing therapeutic silencing agents, a much better understanding of the natural silencing mechanisms used by cells to control retroviruses and retrotranspons is needed. Key questions about HIV silencing that remain to be answered include: What are the primary sequence triggers and mechanisms that induce silencing (i.e. protein repressors and/or viral-derived siRNA)? What conditions lead to proviral DNA methylation? Do similar silencing mechanisms operate in each of the cell types infected by HIV? Do drugs of abuse block HIV silencing by inducing histone acetylation? Therapeutic approaches to exploit silencing include development of small molecules that enhance DNA methylation, gene-specific induction of silencing by short double-stranded RNA (or it analogues) and silencing by direction of DNA methyltransferases to promoters through protein mediators. In contrast to traditional antivirals, which require continuous administration, therapeutic epigenetic gene silencing has the potential to produce stable inheritable blocks to viral replication after only a single exposure of an infec

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
Type
NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (NDPA) (DP1)
Project #
3DP1DA028869-02S1
Application #
8258069
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZDA1-NXR-B (12))
Program Officer
Satterlee, John S
Project Start
2009-09-30
Project End
2014-08-31
Budget Start
2010-09-01
Budget End
2011-08-31
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2011
Total Cost
$153,860
Indirect Cost
Name
Case Western Reserve University
Department
Biochemistry
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
077758407
City
Cleveland
State
OH
Country
United States
Zip Code
44106
Alvarez-Carbonell, David; Garcia-Mesa, Yoelvis; Milne, Stephanie et al. (2017) Toll-like receptor 3 activation selectively reverses HIV latency in microglial cells. Retrovirology 14:9
Nguyen, Kien; Das, Biswajit; Dobrowolski, Curtis et al. (2017) Multiple Histone Lysine Methyltransferases Are Required for the Establishment and Maintenance of HIV-1 Latency. MBio 8:
Garcia-Mesa, Yoelvis; Jay, Taylor R; Checkley, Mary Ann et al. (2017) Immortalization of primary microglia: a new platform to study HIV regulation in the central nervous system. J Neurovirol 23:47-66
Li, Qing; Karim, Ahmad F; Ding, Xuedong et al. (2016) Novel high throughput pooled shRNA screening identifies NQO1 as a potential drug target for host directed therapy for tuberculosis. Sci Rep 6:27566
Das, Biswajit; Dobrowolski, Curtis; Shahir, Abdel-Malek et al. (2015) Short chain fatty acids potently induce latent HIV-1 in T-cells by activating P-TEFb and multiple histone modifications. Virology 474:65-81
Mbonye, Uri R; Wang, Benlian; Gokulrangan, Giridharan et al. (2015) Phosphorylation of HEXIM1 at Tyr271 and Tyr274 Promotes Release of P-TEFb from the 7SK snRNP Complex and Enhances Proviral HIV Gene Expression. Proteomics 15:2078-86
Chen, Yupeng; Zhang, Lirong; Estarás, Conchi et al. (2014) A gene-specific role for the Ssu72 RNAPII CTD phosphatase in HIV-1 Tat transactivation. Genes Dev 28:2261-75
Tilton, Carisa A; Tabler, Caroline O; Lucera, Mark B et al. (2014) A combination HIV reporter virus system for measuring post-entry event efficiency and viral outcome in primary CD4+ T cell subsets. J Virol Methods 195:164-9
Mbonye, Uri; Karn, Jonathan (2014) Transcriptional control of HIV latency: cellular signaling pathways, epigenetics, happenstance and the hope for a cure. Virology 454-455:328-39
Jadlowsky, Julie K; Wong, Julian Y; Graham, Amy C et al. (2014) Negative elongation factor is required for the maintenance of proviral latency but does not induce promoter-proximal pausing of RNA polymerase II on the HIV long terminal repeat. Mol Cell Biol 34:1911-28

Showing the most recent 10 out of 18 publications