Basic & Translational Science Steering Committee (BTS-SC)

Basic & Translational Science Steering Committee (BTS-SC):

The Harvard University Center for AIDS Research (HU CFAR) has recently formed a Basic & Translational Science Steering Committee (BTS-SC) to chart a strategic direction and guide implementation of activities that engage and support lab-based HIV researchers at Harvard and its affiliated institutions.

The HU CFAR has a long-standing history of highly collaborative and productive basic research science. Since the CFAR’s inception at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in 1989, HU scientists have made numerous basic science advancements that impacted discoveries of antiviral therapeutics. With the advent of combinatorial antiretroviral therapy (ART) in 1996, research over the past 25+ years has naturally shifted toward epidemiological sciences including comorbidities and public health equities. Accordingly, in recent years, HU CFAR leadership has noticed huge trends for next generation researchers and junior faculty to choose epidemiological research tracts over basic science.

We have established the BTS-SC to counter this trend and highlight for our junior colleagues the importance of basic science alongside epidemiological pursuits. Given that current ART medicines and pipeline approaches toward HIV cure and vaccination are borne from basic science, we feel that re-engagement of junior colleagues in basic science is critical to effective long-term management of the HIV pandemic.

Goals of the BTS-SC:

The overall goal of the BTS-SC is to provide advice and support to the HU CFAR leadership to advance basic and translational research within the HU CFAR. The BTS-SC will have regular monthly meetings to identify strengths and weaknesses including scientific gaps in the basic HIV research portfolio within the HU CFAR and to discuss strategies for expanding or newly establishing areas of high scientific importance. Specifically, the BTS-SC aims to leverage the existent rich and diverse landscape of basic science at Harvard University to recruit investigators from areas of cutting-edge basic and translational research that have not previously been involved in HIV research. The aim is to stimulate novel collaborations and induce creative thinking around topics currently underrepresented at the HU CFAR. Ideas that are thought to be specifically critical to the field will be considered for the formation of a Scientific Working Group (SWG) to develop the identified topic into a focused scientific research effort. To keep the HU CFAR community informed and to elicit additional collaborations, the BTS-SC will plan and organize annual symposia focused on fundamental HIV science and will also act as sponsor/co-sponsor for webinars that highlight HU CFAR basic science/translational research. Finally, the BTS-SC will promote funding opportunities through the CFAR Developmental & Mentoring Core of early-stage investigators doing basic science research.

Leadership:

Co-Chair: Alan Engelman, PhD; DFCI: Dr Engelman is a Professor of Medicine at HMS with an affiliated appointment in the Department of Microbiology. Dr. Engelman’s research focuses on virus-host interactions during the early phase of HIV replication, including integration. His research helped to explain the mechanism of action of integrase strand transfer inhibitors, which are widely used in the clinic, as well as mechanisms of drug resistance. Dr Engelman’s R01 grant on HIV integration has twice been awarded R37 MERIT status. Dr Engelman co-directs a T32 Training Program on HIV Related Research at DFCI, and has served on over 50 NIH Study Sections, including 17 as Chair.

Co-Chair: Boris Juelg, MD, PhD; MGH and Ragon Institute: Dr Juelg is an Infectious Diseases physician at MGH where he directs the Infectious Disease Clinical Research Unit and serves as the associate director of the HU CFAR clinical core. He is also a member of the Ragon Institute where he maintains his lab. Dr Juelg’ s work focuses on identifying, developing, and evaluating immunotherapeutic interventions including therapeutic vaccination and monoclonal antibodies with an emphasis on translating discoveries from bench to bedside.

Retrovirology Dinner Club Meetings:

The Retrovirology dinner club meetings provide an informal setting for cutting edge talks from colleagues and interactions with other scientists. These meetings follow one of the two formats:

1. Two 30 minute talks from local speakers, with a short break in between – PIs, Fellows, or Graduate Students present, with more junior people generally preferred;
2. One outside speaker for standard 1 hour talk – Should be a visible PI

If you are interested in presenting at these meetings kindly submit your information below:

The Inaugural dinner club meeting was held on Nov 16th, 6PM-8PM, at DFCI which featured talks by Malika A. Boudries (Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) titled “Peripheral Blood Biomarkers of Viral Rebound Following ART Discontinuation in SIV-Infected Rhesus Macaques” and by Tianling Ou (Ph.D. Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Infectious Diseases, Boston Children’s Hospital) titled “Development and evaluation of immunogens that target HIV-1 Env apex precursors”.

Committee members:

The members of the committee, which are representative of different institutions across HU, are experts on a wide variety of scientific areas including basic HIV virology, genomics, immunology, HIV co-infections such as HCV and Tb, vaccine design, and HIV reservoir studies. The Co-Chairs additionally sought world-renowned basic scientists whose own research was more tangential as compared to fully embedded within the HIV field. Committee members range from junior to senior faculty level. The committee therefore reflects the breadth of the scientific landscape at Harvard and associated institutions.

1. Aid-Boudries, Malika, PhD; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: Dr. Aid-Boudries is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research (CVVR). Her research focuses on computational genomics and epigenomics, with a keen interest in decoding the host epigenetics determinant of HIV integration and the latent HIV reservoir maintenance and persistence to identify potential biomarkers of HIV rebound following ART discontinuation.
2. Barczak, Amy, MD; Ragon Institute: Dr Barczak is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS and the director of research in the ID division at MGH. Her work focusses on molecular pathogenesis and immune response to Mycobacteria tuberculosis.
3. Billingsley, James, PhD; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Dr Billingsley has a PhD in Immunology and developed his interests in high dimension computational methods during his postdoctoral training. Prior to joining the Core, James worked as a Bioinformatics Analyst at the Yerkes Non-human Primate Genomics Core at Emory University. His primary interests at the Chan Bioinformatics Core are focused on single-cell RNA-seq, and his additional research interests include characterizing correlates of protection in non-human primate models of HIV vaccines, and understanding mechanisms maintaining HIV latency.
4. D’Souza, Victoria, PhD; Harvard University: Dr D’Souza, who is a Professor of Molecular Cellular Biology at Harvard University, is interested in studying the structural determinants of reverse transcription and gene translation in retroviruses such as HIV, Human T-cell leukemia virus and Moloney murine leukemia virus. Dr D’Souza is also a faculty member of the University of Michigan CRNA U54 Center.
5. Gaiha, Gaurav, MD, DPhil; Ragon Institute: Dr Gaiha is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS who is developing novel T cell vaccine candidates against HIV-1 and other viral pathogens that target epitopes derived from structurally-constrained regions of viral proteins.
6. Gewurz, Benjamin, MD, PhD; Brigham and Women’s Hospital: Dr Gewurz is an Associate Professor of Medicine at HMS and the Associate Chair of the Harvard Graduate Program in Virology. He is interested in Epstein-Barr virus host interactions and B-cell biology during viral infections.
7. Goldfeld, Anne, MD; Boston Children’s Hospital: Dr Goldfeld is a Professor of Medicine at HMS and a Professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on HIV transcriptional regulation and on the comorbidly of tuberculosis in AIDS.
8. Hur, Sun, PhD; Boston Children’s Hospital and HHMI: Dr Hur is a Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at HMS. She is interested in molecular mechanisms of self and non-self-discrimination by the immune systems, focusing on the innate immune receptors involved in antiviral immune response. Dr Sun is a faculty member of the U54 Center for Structural Biology of HIV RNA (CRNA; University of Michigan).
9. Lauer, Georg, MD, PhD; Massachusetts General Hospital: Dr Lauer is an Associate Professor of Medicine at HMS who studies the T cell response against hepatitis B and C viruses, with or without HIV co-infection. His focus is on supporting the development of HBV immunotherapies and prophylactic vaccines for HCV, but also on using these infections as model diseases to understand basic mechanisms of human immunology.
10. Nasr, Mahmoud, PhD, RPh; Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Nasr is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS and an Associate member of Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. His current research focuses on studying the initial events that lead to a viral infection at the molecular level. The goal is to design novel antivirals and vaccines against a variety of challenging viruses.
11. Tsibris, Athe, MD; Brigham and Women’s Hospital: Dr Tsibris is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS and the co-director of the HU CFAR Developmental and Mentoring Core. His research focusses on the biology and dynamics of the HIV reservoir in blood and tissues.