This was prior to the now Sept/Oct 2024 Allogenic
Post# of 149154
But also shows Dr. Sacha lab screened for addtl viruses.
Long Acting LL could end up also being a multi indication resevoir clearance combo, beyond Hiv ??
Jun 2018- Sep 2020
Research Assistant II
Dr. Jonah Sacha Lab, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA.
Direct supervision and mentoring by Dr. Helen Wu (Staff Scientist, OHSU)
Division of Pathobiology & Immunology, Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC)
Description/Role:
In the pre-clinical HIV immunology lab of Dr. Jonah Sacha, I worked on a project of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in Mauritian cynomolgus macaques (MCM) to determine mechanisms of post-transplant viral clearance. HSCT has the capacity to deplete the HIV reservoir and control viral replication, but the mechanism of how this occurs was not previously understood. The MCM animal model recapitulates important variables such as engraftment failure, graft-versus-host disease, and infectious disease burden and complications. Throughout our studies, I was responsible for processing blood and tissue biopsies, screening animals for several viral opportunistic infections, utilizing flow cytometry for longitudinal hematology immune monitoring, and sorting immune cell subsets of interest for input into the deep sequencing pipeline and analyzing for donor chimerism measurements. Using this model, we achieved viral reservoir clearance in blood and tissues of animals that received combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) to suppress viral replication, which correlated with high donor chimerism. The next phase of the study involved cART-release of the transplant animals and monitoring for viral rebound or continued suppression. Upon cART-release, we observed that post-transplant viral clearance is due to allogeneic immunity. This finding represents a major step in the field for understanding HIV cure and designing therapeutic modalities that can recapitulate this mechanism (7). During my time in the lab, we published our findings describing the viral opportunistic infections we encountered with the model (6, 13), as well as the leukapheresis method that we utilized to collect stem cells for HSCT (12). I contributed to additional projects that explored alternative therapeutics for HIV prevention and cure to more broadly contribute to the HIV cure field. These include a CMV vaccine vector (10), a monoclonal antibody therapy (9, 11), an IL-15 superagonist cytokine therapy (14), and others. I assisted with blood and tissue processing for these animal studies, hematology monitoring by flow cytometry, and completed small molecular projects.