Cecile Lahiri

What they work on

1. Test whether markers of HIV persisting in rectal tissue are linked to whole-body inflammation, immune activation, and the presence and progression of early, symptom-free heart disease, using repeated heart imaging and paired blood and rectal biopsies in about 100 virally suppressed people with HIV.
2. Define how HIV hiding in the gut disturbs the gut's immune defenses and lets bacteria leak into the blood to fuel inflammation, by profiling gut gene activity and the microbes and metabolites circulating in blood.
3. Map sex-specific patterns and predictors of weight change after people with HIV switch to or add integrase strand-transfer inhibitors (INSTIs), comparing them over five years with people on other ART and with HIV-negative controls in the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study.
4. Measure how cardiometabolic risk indicators change in women and men after starting INSTIs, to test the hypothesis that these drugs disturb insulin signaling and promote fat storage.
5. Identify sex-specific metabolic signatures of INSTI-associated weight gain by combining metabolomic and inflammatory profiles with cardiometabolic risk indicators, using community detection and differential network analysis, two network-based bioinformatics methods.
6. Relate the blood metabolome and lipidome (the full sets of small molecules and fats) and HIV reservoir size to subclinical heart disease in women and men, using high-resolution metabolomics and lipidomics in a cohort that is more than half women.
7. Determine sex-specific multi-omic signatures linked to higher risk of early heart disease across different HIV reservoir sizes, by integrating metabolomic, lipidomic and other molecular data.
8. Build a predictive model of successful aging in people with HIV, using existing MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study data plus new information on food intake and physical activity, to point toward social and behavioral interventions.
9. Examine whether activation of genes controlled by TGF-β, a growth-regulating signaling protein, drives aging of CD4 T cells, and how this relates to HIV reservoir size, chronic inflammation and multiple age-related diseases.
10. Test whether low estrogen from ovarian deficiency and HIV act together in aging women to worsen a leaky gut and immune imbalance, driving disease in bone, brain and heart, through three linked center research projects.

More about the research

Why it matters

Heart disease, diabetes and obesity are leading causes of serious illness and death among people with HIV, even when the virus is fully suppressed. Women with HIV face especially high relative risk. By pinpointing how gut-resident virus, inflammation and specific HIV drugs raise this risk, the work could reveal new targets for prevention or treatment. It could also identify blood markers for early screening and guide doctors in choosing HIV drugs for high-risk patients. The center's work points to the gut as a possible target for diet, probiotics or fecal transplantation in women with HIV.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Closest labs

The school

Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.

More about Emory University

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