Search for cure to HIV

AIDS foundation puts up $20M to fund institute headquartered at UCSF

SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the world’s top AIDS scientists unveiled a plan on Monday to create a major new Institute for HIV Cure Research, with the ambitious goal of eliminating the deadly virus from those who are infected.

With a gift of $20 million over five years from the Foundation for AIDS Research, the institute will support the work of investigators at labs and clinics at UC San Francisco, a long-standing pioneer in AIDS research. The foundation, known as amfAR, announced the grant at a news conference on the eve of World AIDS Day.

“We’ll have the freedom to think bigger and pivot more quickly as the science in the field evolves,” said Dr. Paul Volberding, a UCSF professor of medicine who founded the nation’s first inpatient ward for people with AIDS in the 1980s and led the university’s competitive bid for funding.

Kevin Frost, CEO of amfAR, said scientists “have learned from other technical challenges, like the Manhattan Project and NASA’s race to the moon, that getting teams to collaborate as a cohesive enterprise is the way to achieve extraordinary goals.”

Calling UC San Francisco an extraordinary “collection of talent,” Frost said the campus won the competition for the institute because of its historic role in scientific innovation, the geographic clustering of its scientists and the strength of its book-length application, which emerged from months of meetings and more than 3,000 emails.

San Francisco has played an essential role in combating AIDS, said fashion designer

Kenneth Cole, chairman of the board of amfAR, which is based in New York City.

“Its people have suffered in greater numbers and it has been on the front lines of science, since day one,” he said.

The $20 million award is part of the foundation’s $100 million investment strategy to achieve a cure for HIV.

As the host institution, UCSF will provide the headquarters for the institute on its Mission Bay campus. Funds will support not only UCSF research but also work at the university-affiliated Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and the Blood Systems Research Institute, along with outside academic partners.

On Tuesday, the university will host the amfAR sponsored 2015 HIV Cure Summit, where scientists will describe inroads against the disease.

Until recently, the idea of an AIDS cure was met with disdain and skepticism, said Frost. The foundation was accused of giving false hope to a goal that many believed was scientifically impossible.

“Thankfully, there has been a tectonic shift,” Frost said.

The institute will focus on a strategy called “shock and kill,” said scientists. Drugs are used to wake up the virus where it lies hidden in blood and tissue, so that infected cells become visible to the immune system. The institute aims to develop therapies that will then kill these infected cells.

Foster City-based Gilead Sciences, a partner in the institute, has begun a small study in monkeys of a drug that stimulates the immune system and shows signs of reversing viral latency.

The institute’s goal is to find a cure by 2020, though this is not a guarantee.

“But we will be a lot closer than we are right now — and a lot better off for having tried,” said Frost, noting progress will likely be incremental, without a “Eureka!” moment of therapeutic breakthrough.

More than 96,000 Californians diagnosed with AIDS have died since the beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s, according to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Globally, more than 35 million people are infected with HIV.

Thousands of Bay Area residents live with the virus — 3,301 in Santa Clara County and 5,590 in Alameda County, for example, according to the most recent state data available.

But the region’s rate of new infections has plummeted, the result of a raft of educational and prevention programs.

Institute-funded scientists said they will focus their work on finding better anti-viral drugs; new ways to identify and measure the virus in blood and tissues; and improved approaches for recruiting volunteers to engage in clinical trials.

The institute will give hope to those who are weary after living with HIV for years, said Berkeley resident Matt Sharp, 59, who has coped with the virus for more than 35 years.

Many survivors struggle with the rigor of ongoing treatments, sadness over the loss of friends and distress over HIV-related effects of aging, he said.

“It is amazing that I am alive to bear witness,” said Sharp, who has volunteered in dozens of clinical trials to support research and his personal health.

The institute “will create the ‘knowledge momentum’ that it will take to end the most devastating epidemic of our time,” he said.