Phillip Berman, Chair of Biomolecular Engineering at UCSC, has been awarded a five-year, $3.5 million grant from NIDA (the National Institute on Drug Abuse) to develop an AIDS vaccine.
Phillip Berman, Chair of Biomolecular Engineering at UCSC, has been awarded a five-year, $3.5 million grant from NIDA (the National Institute on Drug Abuse) to develop an AIDS vaccine. The research will center on natural variations of the HIV virus that occur in the early stages of infection. In the August issue of the Journal of Virology, Berman described a new method called “swarm analysis” to study these variations, one of which appears to change the shape of an HIV coat protein, making it more susceptible to antibodies.
Results of a trial on another vaccine, developed by Berman in the 1990s, will be announced in Paris this October at the 2009 AIDS Vaccine Conference. Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
