ViiV Healthcare links with academia for new drug targets for HIV

HIV/AIDS focused company ViiV Healthcare has entered a five-year collaboration with Radboud university medical center (Radboudumc) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands,providing dedicated funding to enhance the HIV-specific capability of the Human Functional Genomics Project (HFGP).

The HFGP is a large-scale project that combines detailed patient data with cross-omics information, host immune responses and environmental factors to better understand how the body recognizes and defends itself from disease as well as the signs, symptoms and progression of disease.

Under the supervision of a scientific management board (SMB) comprising representatives from ViiV Healthcare, which is majority-owned by UK pharma major GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK), and Radboudumc, Radboudumc will expand the cohort of HIV-infected individuals that are part of the HFGP from 200 to 2000 people. Data from this cohort will be used to look at the predictors and pathways of diseases that are specific to people living with HIV and how they might differ from other disease areas and from healthy people who do not have HIV. Using that information, the goal is to identify early-stage drug targets that ViiV Healthcare could use to develop new medicines or approaches to treat HIV infection.