Angela Raquel Wahl
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Microbiology & Immunology
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) can push HIV down to undetectable levels in the blood, but it does not cure the infection. Virus capable of replicating hides in cells and tissues, and it comes back when treatment stops.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
HIV latency
viral reservoir
antiretroviral therapy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Analyze how the HIV reservoir forms in the gastrointestinal tract of BLT humanized mice on antiretroviral therapy, measuring HIV DNA and transcripts in gut CD4+ T cells compared with blood.
- Measure the gut's contribution to viral rebound after analytical treatment interruption, and test whether latency-reversing agents can induce HIV from resting CD4+ T cells in intestinal tissue.
- Use a germ-free BLT humanized mouse model to determine whether the gut microbiome, the intestinal bacterial community, is needed to establish and maintain the HIV reservoir and drive rebound.
- Determine how effectively antiretroviral therapy suppresses HIV in human microglia, the brain's long-lived resident immune cells, using humanized mice reconstituted with human brain microglia.
- Characterize the viral reservoir inside infected microglia and track whether latency develops and rebound occurs in the brain after treatment interruption, to test whether myeloid cells are a source of viral reactivation.
More about the research
Finding a cure means knowing exactly which cells hold that hidden virus, where in the body they sit, and what keeps them quiet. Two projects address this using humanized mice, animals given human immune cells or human brain cells so that real HIV can infect them and be studied in living tissue.
Why it matters
Current HIV treatments must be taken for life because the virus persists in hidden reservoirs. By pinpointing whether the gut and its bacteria, and brain microglia, harbor replication-competent virus that drives rebound, this work could show that clearing infected T cells alone will not be enough and could guide cure strategies that also target the intestine and the central nervous system, including latency-reversing drugs tested in these models.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
James Whitney
Boston College, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how early the persistent viral reservoir is established after SIV infection and how initiating antiretroviral therapy early limits seeding and expansion of cellular reservoirs.
Matthew R. Reynolds
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how long virus takes to rebound after stopping antiretroviral therapy in rhesus macaques given defined reservoirs of 5x10^4, 1x10^4, 1x10^3 or 1x10^2 laboratory-generated, latently SIV-infected autologous cells.
Taisuke Izumi
American University, DC·Microbiology & Immunology
Test in cell culture whether combining PARP inhibitors with HDAC inhibitors reverses HIV latency more effectively in microglia, using human C20 and HMC3-CD4, rat CHME-5 and mouse BV2 microglial lines plus primary monocyte-derived microglia-like cells.
The school
University of Alabama at Birmingham: 45 labs on PI Pages, $866M a year on research, 166 research doctorates a year.
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