|
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - August 31, 2007
Staff Writer
The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute has hired a prominent HIV scientist, another sign of the region's growing reputation in AIDS research.
Donald Sodora, who runs a lab at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, will join SBRI on Sept. 4 as a principal investigator in the institute's viral vaccines program. He'll also take a faculty position with the University of Washington.
Sodora's research focuses on the mechanics of how HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, actually causes AIDS. His lab works with monkeys, using the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which is the equivalent of HIV in monkeys, as a model.
The recruitment of Sodora is a sign of the growing momentum behind HIV research in the Puget Sound area. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy, gave $287 million to 16 groups of scientists, or consortia, to speed development of an AIDS vaccine. Two of the grants went to Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and one went to SBRI.
The Hutchinson Center is also home to the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, an international scientific collaboration funded by the National Institutes of Health. More than 1,000 of the world's top HIV vaccine scientists gathered in Seattle in August for a four-day AIDS conference.
Sodora said the University of Texas doesn't have a major focus in HIV research and said he was drawn to Seattle by the growing number of scientists working in the field.
"My biggest draw to come here was the potential for multiple collaborations at SBRI, the University of Washington, the Hutch. It was very appealing," Sodora said.
Sodora works with two species of monkey, the rhesus macaque of Asia and sooty mangabey of West Africa. The rhesus macaque becomes ill six months to two years following SIV infection, while the sooty mangabey remains disease-free even when the SIV virus is replicating at high levels.
Sodora is trying to figure out what gives the mangabey a natural resistance to the disease -- and apply that to a future HIV vaccine for humans. One possible factor: Sooty mangabeys generate only a low-level immune response to SIV. Immune systems, when activated for prolonged periods as with an HIV infection, become compromised over time and grow
dysfunctional. That immune dysfunction is one of the key components in the progression to full-blown AIDS.
Sodora's work on HIV resistance has attracted national and international media attention in recent years. He also does research on oral transmission of SIV in monkeys, including mother-to-baby transmission during breast feeding, and is developing a treatment to help monkey immune systems recover from prolonged SIV infection.
The monkeys that Sodora works with are housed in NIH-sponsored primate centers in Atlanta, Beaverton, Ore., and San Antonio, Texas.
Most SBRI investigators who have appointments to the UW are members of the university's pathobiology and microbiology departments. Pathobiology is due to be folded into UW's new Global Health Department, which was established with a grant from the Seattle-based Gates Foundation. But it's not clear yet whether SBRI scientists will become part of Global Health or some other department, said SBRI spokeswoman Lee Schoentrup.
SBRI, founded in 1976, is one of Puget Sound's largest nonprofit research institutes. Schoentrup said SBRI is preparing to hire a new vice president for finance, to replace the institute's chief financial and chief operating officers, who resigned earlier this year.
Contact:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
• 206-447-8505x117
|
