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A ������ virologist and biophysicist is one step closer to understanding how HIV spreads once it enters the human body, thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

More specifically, Associate Professor aims to further develop and utilize specific instruments, like super-resolution and single-molecule tracking tools, to understand the mechanisms of virus transfer.

One key part of this process is the envelope glycoprotein (Env), which attaches HIV to the cells it infects and plays a crucial role in fusing the virus with healthy cells. Scientists don’t fully understand how Env gets incorporated into the virus or how it helps the virus spread from one cell to another.

The grant, which was awarded in June, is a renewal of a previous grant van Engelenburg and his lab were awarded back in 2018 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Starting in 2018, the team developed new microscopes so they could visualize the virus replication process on a single molecule basis.

“Surprisingly, this has been a challenging aspect of the viral infection cycle to study, and it's really because it requires a multidisciplinary kind of approach—bringing in aspects of cell biology, virology, biochemistry and, in my laboratory, optical imaging,” he says.

The general infection process involves a virus attaching to a cell and releasing its genetic material into that cell. This also allows for antibodies to latch on and neutralize the virus.��

HIV, however, has “this natural propensity to coalesce or to self-assemble because they’re essentially programmed this way in their genetic code,” van Engelenburg says.

Cells are often communicating through cellular contact with one another in the body for any number of reasons, he says. HIV utilizes that communication process to spread rapidly.

The goal, van Engelenburg says, is to conduct research that could help others create antiviral treatments that specifically target and disrupt this process in the early stages. There are currently no drug treatments that target this stage of assembly, he says.

“So, while we're not developing antiviral therapies, we’re trying to lay the groundwork to understand mechanistically how these things function, and then that will inform future studies as to what aspects of these mechanisms are the best to be drugged,” he says.

van Engelenburg touts the interdisciplinary nature of his lab, specifically the use of super-resolution optical imaging approaches, techniques that aren’t widely employed in the virology field.

“Now they are becoming more popularized because they're so powerful in��teaching us how viruses are doing these various things in their infection cycles,” he says.

He also noted the importance of having interdisciplinary programs like DU’s molecular and cellular biophysics PhD program.

“I think we’re really poised to learn a lot more about how this virus works,” van Engelenburg says.