In FIU’s smoke-free campus, a smoking robot aids Professor Hoshang Unwalla in groundbreaking research on the effects of smoking and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Backed by five NIH grants, including four R01s and a $2.56 million award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Unwalla decodes the airway epithelial transcriptome in HIV-associated chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Combination antiretroviral therapy, popularly known as drug cocktails, has made HIV infection a treatable chronic condition. However, Unwalla notes that HIV patients die almost a decade earlier than the HIV-negative population from comorbidities, including lung diseases like COPD, pulmonary hypertension and pneumonia, which are prevalent among people with HIV.
“These co-existing conditions are exacerbated in HIV patients who are addicted to nicotine and smoke tobacco,” says Unwalla. His research lab focuses on identifying the factors that promote lung inflammation in people with HIV, aiming to develop drugs or other treatments that restore lung function or impede further deterioration.
In a recent breakthrough, Unwalla and researcher Srinivasan Chinnapaiyan obtained a patent for a revolutionary HIV-inducible self-inactivating CRISPR gene editing technique. This method targets the cellular gene CyclinT1, crucial for HIV replication only within HIV-infected cells, offering both safety and effectiveness in silencing the virus and mitigating associated comorbidities.