Designer Molecules – Engineering a Better Approach to HIV Treatment

Ravi Kane Receives Grant From the National Institutes of Health

Ravi Kane, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is designing brand-new molecules that may one day fend off an HIV infection. Bolstering the body’s molecular defenses is a novel method that may lead to highly effective treatments for HIV, the virus that can lead to AIDS.

Kane has received a two-year, $150,000 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health, to pursue research into this promising HIV treatment.

The Trouble With Today’s Treatments

Today’s FDA-approved HIV treatments take aim at the virus itself. Drugs used in the standard “cocktail” regimens, including reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors, are intended to disable HIV at two stages in its replication process. Such treatments are undoubtedly lifesaving for many people; however, they deliver varying success due to the ongoing emergence of resistant HIV strains. These drugs are also expensive and lead to a host of side-effects, including lipodystrophy (abnormal fat accumulation or loss in certain parts of the body) and dangerously high cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

A New Approach: Defensive Maneuvers

Kane’s research team at Rensselaer, and Albany Medical Center collaborators Kathy Stellrecht and Dennis Metzger, are trying a different approach. The Rensselaer team is designing molecules that block the particular receptors (located on human cells) that act as the docking sites where the majority of HIV strains make their first attempt at infiltration. These receptors are present all over the cell surface, requiring a molecule with a “multi-armed” (or multivalent) structure to do the best job of preventing a virus from docking.

“Multivalency allows us to block more than one receptor with each molecule,” says Kane. “This approach has the potential to be very effective – in fact, orders of magnitude more effective than any existing treatment.”

There are multiple benefits to treating HIV by blocking its entrance to human cells. In contrast to the constantly mutating virus cells, the human receptors are stable and do not change over time, making development of resistance to a blocking drug unlikely. In addition, the new entry inhibitors may be extremely effective without any dangerous side-effects. People with a genetic defect (a natural blockage) in this receptor show immunity to HIV infection, but are otherwise normal. The researchers admit that this preliminary research is very exciting; however, further study and testing will be needed to develop a viable treatment.

“We hope the next two years of work will form the basis of a more detailed grant in the future,” says Kane.

About Rensselaer

Media Contact

Joely Johnson Rensselaer News

All latest news from the category: Health and Medicine

This subject area encompasses research and studies in the field of human medicine.

Among the wide-ranging list of topics covered here are anesthesiology, anatomy, surgery, human genetics, hygiene and environmental medicine, internal medicine, neurology, pharmacology, physiology, urology and dental medicine.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors