CHAPEL HILL A national consortium of researchers led by a team at UNC-Chapel Hill has won a major federal grant aimed at curing AIDS.

The group was awarded $32 million over five years to seek ways to cure HIV patients by eradicating hidden reservoirs in the immune systems of patients taking anti-retroviral drugs.

It's part of the first major funding initiative aimed at eliminating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from the cells and tissues of patients, said Dr. David Margolis, a professor in UNC's School of Medicine and its Gillings School of Global Public Health. He is the principal investigator for the group, which includes researchers from nine other universities.

Many who become infected with the virus can remain relatively healthy by using an elaborate and often expensive regimen of drugs that can block its effects.

But the virus itself never goes away. Instead, bits of its genetic material remain, dormant, in some cells and tissue, said Margolis, who specializes in microbiology, immunology and epidemiology. If a patient stops taking the drugs, the virus can become active again, infecting new cells.

The researchers will try find a way to locate those bits of HIV genetic material and then entirely purge them from the body.

"We're essentially trying to force the virus out into the open," Margolis said.

It's the largest of three related grants that were announced Monday by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Seeking drug that works

Each consortium will take a different and complementary approach to attacking the reservoirs of the virus, said Nalini Padmanabhan, a spokeswoman for NIAID.

Between them, the three grants could eventually total $70 million if funding is available for all five years, she said.

The UNC-led effort will launch 15 research projects that, among other things, would try to discover how the virus can remain dormant and nearly undetectable, and to identify drugs and methods that can purge it from the body.

An unfunded partner in the grant is the pharmaceutical company Merck, which has development drugs and other therapies that target such reservoirs of virus.

The grant comes on the heels of an announcement in May that another UNC-CH-led group had found that the antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV patients can be a strong barrier to spreading of the disease.

If a way to purge patients of the virus can be found, that could join such prevention methods to put HIV in a kind of squeeze play that could sharply reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on society, Margolis said.

Lifting the burden

"We need to work from both ends," he said. "Prevention, and then in cases where we aren't able to prevent it, we need tools to eradicate the disease."

The current treatment regimens, he said, mean keeping patients alive, which is a good thing, but costly. Being able to cure patients entirely would lift that burden for society.

The new grants are unlikely to be enough to develop a cure, but they could provide a solid start, Margolis said.

"We hope to make concrete advances that can be measured, and that attract more funding," he said.

"You have to start somewhere, and we're really happy to be a part of the beginning of this."