AmfAR awards more than $1.2 million for AIDS research

The American Foundation for AIDS Research announced Friday more than $1.2 million in research grants and fellowships for HIV/AIDS research. Four research fellows--Tomasz Rozmyslowicz of the University of Pennsylvania, Zandrea Ambrose of the National Cancer Institute, David Favre of the J. David Gladstone Institutes, and Ahmad Korchid of the University of Toronto--will share $396.000 for guided research projects on HIV reservoirs and viral latency, microbicides, disrupted immune function, and new anti-HIV drugs. "Much of this funding supports the study of viral reservoirs, where HIV may lie dormant despite years of antiretroviral therapy," said amfAR CEO Jerome J. Radwin. "These grantees and fellows will help describe vital latency, which may be the major factor prevention the eradication of HIV. Their work stands at the vanguard of current HIV research." Other grant winners include Gregory Burton of Brigham Young University; Suzanne Crowe of the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, Australia; Debasish Chattopadhyay of the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Koh Fujinaga of Case Western Reserve University; Miriam Gochin of the University of California, San Francisco; Phalguni Gupta of the University of Pittsburgh; Thomas Hope of the University of Illinois-Chicago; Jason Kimata of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research; and Julian Ma of St. George's Hospital Medical School in London.