Professor Greg Towers, along with Professor David Selwood (WIBR), Dr Leo James (LCMB, Cambridge), Dr Till Böcking and Dr David Jacques (UNSW, Australia), recently received a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award in Science to study pandemic HIV.

There are twelve different types of HIV but just one has caused almost all 87 million infections. The study aims to find out what is special about this common variant. It will focus on the viral capsid, the core of the virus that cloaks HIV from immune detection by the infected cell. Cloaking requires recruitment of host proteins called cofactors that attach to the outside of the capsid. The study will ask ‘What are cofactors doing to the virus and how does this differ between common and rare HIV?’

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