Dentistry’s Daniel Malamud Receives NIH Grant for HIV Research

By Christopher James

Daniel Malamud, professor of basic science and craniofacial biology at the College of Dentistry, has been awarded a five-year, $6.2 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to head up a research collective consisting of four interrelated research projects, along with administrative, biostatistical, and clinical core components. The collective’s overall goal is to define the interactions between host defense molecules and bacteria in HIV infection and subsequent antiretroviral therapy.

The collective comprises teams from NYU College of Dentistry (NYUCD), New York University School of Medicine (NYUSoM) and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center (ADARC). Malamud has assembled a group of renowned investigators—all located within a few blocks of each other on First Avenue in Manhattan.

“The study is an intriguing one,” notes Malamud. “We are going to recruit a population of people that are HIV-infected but are drug naïve, so they haven’t even been put on treatment yet. New York City is probably one of the few places in the country where the study could be done.”

The entire proposal utilizes the same case-controlled study population consisting of 85 HIV-positive, HARRT—highly aggressive anti-retroviral therapy—naïve subjects who will subsequently begin antiretroviral therapy. There will also be a similar cohort of HIV-negative subjects. The clinical core will obtain oral and GI samples, monitor patient progress, carry out complete oral health examinations, and maintain all subject records.

“We’re going to take a variety of samples from the subjects, and then we are going to put the HIV+ subjects on drug treatment for two to three years,” says Malamud. “We want to see how various parameters throughout the GI tract are affected by HIV infection and then by the subsequent control of HIV through a cocktail of drugs, known as HARRT.”