Raj Kamal Tripathi, Ph.D.
Senior Principal Scientist & Chairperson
Division of Virus Research and Therapeutics
Protein-Protein interactions (PPI) are instrumental to operate most biological processes regulating all types of cellular functions. Similarly, Virus-host protein interactions are obligatory to hijack all physiological pathways in the host in their favour for production of new virons. HIV belongs to the retroviridae family of genome size 9.2 Kb expressing fifteen proteins and most of them interact with host proteins to rearrange cellular pathways for successful completion of the viral life cycle. The virus-host protein interactions have been considered to be novel targets for developing anti-viral therapeutics.
There are several drugs developed against different target proteins of HIV which can control but cannot cure the HIV pathogenesis. I picked HIV-1 Nef protein hypothesizing that this protein has the potential to cure HIV pathogenesis. Therefore, since 2002 my lab has been working on the identification of novel Nef-host protein interactions regulating cellular pathways for viral replication and on exploiting said interactions to develop inhibitors that could be developed as therapeutics as an alternative therapy to treat HIV-1 pathogenesis.
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