An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the Pitt School of Medicine, along with researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Hawaii at Mānoa, have secured a five-year, $6.2 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study how HIV puts children at greater risk of contracting and dying from tuberculosis.
The grant will fund nonhuman primate experiments to understand disease mechanisms and explore a potential therapeutic approach. Then, extending from the laboratory to the field, the researcher will investigate whether the same findings are true for children living in Myanmar, where rates of HIV and TB are both high.
“Kids are not small adults. They have distinct immune responses. You can’t necessarily extrapolate results from adults to kids,” said principal investigator Charles Scanga, research associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. “Our first goal is to check whether we see in kids what we have already shown in adults—in a model of kids who may go many months or years without being diagnosed, which is the unfortunate clinical reality in underserved parts of the world.”
Scanga’s lab is located in Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research, which is one of the few infectious disease labs in the world equipped with a PET-CT scanner. That imaging technology allows Scanga to observe disease progression in infected animals over time.