Project Overview

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a retrovirus responsible for one of the largest viral epidemics in recent history, with over 35 million individuals currently infected. Moreover, a majority of affected individuals live in resource-poor developing nations. This virus is highly effective at avoiding immune detection, and has the capacity to integrate into the genome of the host’s immune cells. Upon progression of the infection, the virus causes depletion of the host’s CD4+ T-cells, diminishing the body’s capacity for cell-mediated immunity. Over the course of several years, the individual becomes susceptible to other opportunistic infections, and eventually the patient is considered to have Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), a condition with varied negative symptoms that can result in death.

Many anti-retroviral treatments (ART) currently exist, and they can reduce the activity of the virus to manageable levels, making the infection both survivable and the symptoms tolerable despite the infection never being eradicated. However, management of the virus requires monitoring the patient’s Viral Load (VL), a metric indicating the amount of virus present in the blood. Infections often resurge, usually due to treatment failure, and a spike in VL can predict this treatment failure before AIDS symptoms return (unlike other metrics such as T-cell count), allowing the patient to change treatments and continue to keep viral activity down. Some ART treatments are cheap enough to be utilized in developing countries. However, VL assays remain cost-prohibitive as well as dependent on infrastructure and organization that is often lacking, and so in resource-limited settings there is a need for both Point-of-Care (POC) and non-Point-of-Care VL assays that are cheap, require little or no external electricity, and require no refrigeration.

Our team proposes the design of such a VL assay using an RNA-sequence-detecting Riboswitch which utilizes toehold-mediated strand displacement to enable expression of a reporter protein in e. coli cell-free expression system. Examples of such systems can be found in the following articles:

http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(14)01289-6

http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(14)01291-4

Team Picture

Contact Information

Team Members

• Bailey Flanigan - Team Leader
• Joseph Vecchi - Communicator
• Veronica Porubsky - BSAC
• Nicolaas Angenent-Mari - BWIG & BPAG

Advisor and Client

• Prof. Tracy Jane Puccinelli - Advisor
• Prof. Dave Beebe - Client

Related Projects

• Spring 2016: Design of a novel HIV viral load assay for use in resource settings
• Fall 2015: Design of a novel HIV viral load assay for use in low-resource settings