Tom Banks, a mathematics professor and director of N.C. State’s Center for Research and Scientific Computation, and Marie Davidian, a professor of statistics, are part of a group of researchers who are developing mathematical models to help determine the best treatment strategy for HIV patients.
The researchers are not attempting to cure HIV but to make treatment more effective. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease awarded the researchers a $3.5 million grant July 1. The grant is good for five years.
“We’re very optimistic about our research,” Banks said. “We believe that we have a pretty good model that can produce accurate predictions.”
According to Banks, when a person is infected with HIV, the quantity of virus in that person’s bloodstream, the viral load, increases exponentially. However, over time, the viral load decreases until it reaches a set point. This has led some researches to wonder whether to start newly infected patients on treatment immediately or to allow the immune system to “adapt” to the virus by holding off on treatment.
Also, the HIV virus develops resistance to medications the longer the patient is treated with them. This leads to “drug holidays” or periods of time that the patient is not taking the medication.
The models that Banks and Davidian have created are designed to simulate what will happen to a patient’s viral load under certain circumstances; such as starting treatment immediately or placing the patient on a three-month “drug holiday” in between four-month periods of treatment.
“This model describes what will happen to the patient’s viral load under certain parameters,” Davidian said. “By testing different sets of parameters, we hope to find out which one is most favorable and implement that in treatment.”
This is the second grant that the team has received for this research. The first one ran from 2002 to 2006 and was a collaboration with Eric Rosenberg, a clinician at Massachusetts General Hospital. Rosenberg is also part of the team conducting the continued research under the renewed grant.
“Eric has been a huge part of this research,” Banks said, “Without his huge amount of research data, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
The team hopes to conduct a clinical trial later this year to test the predictive capability of their model. The trial has not been approved yet.
The model has other implications for medicine beyond just HIV. It shows how the immune response system reacts under certain conditions and a better understanding of how the immune response system works would enable researchers to better treat other infectious diseases.
“The implications of understanding the immune response system are huge,” Banks said. “We would be better able to treat diseases other than HIV and improve the success rate of organ transplant.”
All of the data analysis will be done on the University campus. Rosenberg will conduct the actual clinical trial at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“No one has studied, in a systematic way what might happen if you treat or don’t treat an acutely infected HIV patient,” Davidian said. “Hopefully, this model will provide us with an effective treatment strategy of this virus.”
