NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A new research consortium led by the Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute will use a $21 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct systems biology-based studies of the earliest immune system responses to HIV infection.

The multidisciplinary research effort will include DNA sequencing, expression analysis, RNAi analysis, mass spectrometry, and other efforts aimed at discovering the cellular protein mechanisms that are the first line of defense against HIV.

Along with Salk and Sanford-Burnham, the research program will fund research at the University of California, San Francisco; Mount Sinai School of Medicine; the University of California, San Diego; Northwestern University; and the University of Pennsylvania.

“The events that occur immediately after exposure to HIV, which determines the ability of the virus to establish infection and ultimately shape the course of the disease, are very poorly understood,” Sumit Chanda, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute, said in statement.

“This grant funds a multi-center consortium that will integrate cutting edge technologies in systems biology and next-generation sequencing, with world-leading expertise in immunology and virology to decode and model the early molecular events that occur after HIV enters the body,” Chanda added. “These projects will be fundamental towards the development of safe and effective HIV vaccines, as well as novel preventative therapies for HIV.”

The research will include next-generation sequencing focused on identifying relevant polymorphisms at Northwestern University, microarray expression analysis at Burnham and Mount Sinai, high-throughput affinity purification mass-spec approaches at UCSF, and large-scale RNAi analysis projects at Sanford-Burnham, Chanda told GenomeWeb Daily News in an e-mail.