Basic Science

Basic science researchers at the Institute of Human Virology aggressively pursue the mechanisms by which viruses attack human cells and spread. Their efforts focus predominately on prevention of disease and the development of biological treatments that may be less toxic to the body than pharmaceutical drugs currently available for treatment.

Dr. Robert C. Gallo, director of the IHV and head of its Basic Science Division, distinguished himself in the field of virology in the early 1980s, when he and his co-workers discovered the first three human retroviruses, one of them the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Gallo and his colleagues then developed a blood test that enabled health professionals, for the first time, to protect the blood supply and to track the disease. Gallo's team also showed how to grow HIV permanently in a lab, leading to test systems used by others to create HIV therapies.

Gallo and his colleagues at the IHV continue in their life-long quest to make scientific discoveries in the lab that translate into real-life benefits for those patients diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, other chronic viral diseases and virally linked cancers.

"Without an investment in research, we stay the same," says Gallo. "If we are to have any medical advances with regard to HIV/AIDS and other chronic viral diseases, they have to originate with basic science discoveries."

The Institute is one of fewer than a handful of sites worldwide offering two innovative clinical trials, one testing the first pharmaceutically-produced compound based on a 1995 Gallo-team discovery that naturally-produced chemokines can block the HIV virus and halt the progression of AIDS. The other, a therapeutic AIDS vaccine designed to target and block the biological activity of tat, a protein that is essential for the replication of the HIV virus and ultimate infection.

Both trials incorporate basic science findings credited to Dr. Gallo and IHV faculty and also exemplify the Institute's mission to hasten scientific progress from bench to bedside, from laboratory setting to actual patient care.