Dr. David Jesse Sanchez was awarded a R03 grant in the amount of $143,000 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of NIH for the project “HIV Redirecting Innate Immunity by Vpu Targeting of JAK1”.  This grant focuses on the discovery that Dr. Sanchez’s laboratory made here at WesternU where HIV destroys a key protein, named JAK1, in immune cells that would normally allow a cell to stop the virus from replicating.  The project aims to understand how HIV destroys this protein toward developing new avenues of therapy that would allow the immune system to recover antiviral activity against HIV.  With this grant, Dr. Sanchez’s laboratory in the College of Pharmacy has been awarded more than $1.1 million in NIH funding to study the immune response to HIV and AIDS.