Kavanagh receives grant for HIV research

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced the winners of Round 6 of its Grand Challenges Explorations initiative. Daniel G. Kavanagh, a member of the faculty at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard, is one of 88 recipients of these $100,000 grants, which fund research to benefit global health and development.

Grand Challenges Explorations funds scientists and researchers worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges.

To receive funding, Kavanagh and other winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global heath and development topic areas: polio eradication, HIV, sanitation, family health technologies, and mobile health. The project supported by this award — “Identification of Candidate Markers of HIV Latency” — will develop new methods to detect and characterize rare cells that are latently infected with HIV in patients on antiretroviral drug treatment.