Weill Cornell Medicine and Rutgers Health have received a four-year, $3 million federal grant to build a research center focused on how HIV affects the brain and how to identify related injuries earlier.
The Cornell announcement says the National Institute of Mental Health award will support the New York-New Jersey Center for Actionable NeuroHIV Biomarkers. Its planned work includes shared research tools, training and pilot funding for investigators at the two institutions.
The grant pays for research capacity, not a new treatment available to patients. Researchers hope to identify biological markers that could eventually improve diagnosis and point toward therapies for neurological complications associated with HIV, but the announcement reports no new diagnostic test or treatment.
Why the center is being built
Dr. Lishomwa Ndhlovu, a Weill Cornell infectious-disease researcher and center co-director, said effective antiretroviral treatment has greatly reduced severe forms of HIV-related dementia. Still, HIV can persist in reservoirs in the body, including the brain, and some people living with the virus experience cognitive or behavioral difficulties, depression or movement problems.
Ndhlovu said researchers do not yet have effective therapies designed specifically to prevent or reduce ongoing brain injury related to HIV. The new center's goal is to study the mechanisms behind that injury and identify targets for future intervention. Those aims remain research questions, not established clinical findings from the grant.
The center will give researchers access to molecular and computational tools tailored to studying HIV's effects on the central nervous system. The team also plans to use human-tissue culture techniques, including organoids — laboratory-grown models sometimes called “mini brains” — to examine how the virus affects brain cells.
A two-state research partnership
Tricia Burdo, a Rutgers Health researcher in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is the other co-director. The institutions already collaborate on HIV prevention, therapies and clinical trials, and the center is intended to draw investigators from across the wider New York-New Jersey research community.
Pilot funding will be available to junior researchers and investigators entering the HIV field at the two institutions. The partners say they will seek more funding after the program is established, with a longer-term ambition of building a broader mental-health research hub for people living with HIV. No amount or timeline for that additional funding has been announced.
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