Prasun K Datta
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Antiretroviral drugs have turned HIV into a manageable long-term condition, but people living with HIV still face problems the drugs do not fix: mild but persistent memory and thinking difficulties, and chronic inflammation that worsens other diseases as they age. Both projects use rhesus macaques infected with SIV, the monkey relative of HIV, and treated with antiretroviral therapy, to ask how aging and a second chronic condition shape outcomes.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
NeuroHIV
HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder
antiretroviral therapy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether age and lactate-driven histone lactylation worsen neurocognitive disease by measuring plasma and cerebrospinal fluid lactate, MRI-based spatial memory, and prefrontal and temporal lobe lactylation in young versus old SIV-infected macaques on antiretroviral therapy.
- Determine whether probiotic-derived lactate alters disease course, by giving probiotics to a subset of young and old SIV-infected macaques for three months before necropsy and assessing lactylation and synaptodendritic injury.
- Examine how microRNA-29b regulates lactate production in human iPSC-derived astrocytes, microglia and neurons exposed to extracellular vesicles from Tat-treated astrocytes and HIV-infected microglia, tracking neuronal metabolism with Seahorse respirometry.
- Delineate how age shapes the oral microbiome and salivary biomarkers in health, how they shift with ligature-induced periodontitis in rhesus macaques, and how a subsequent SIV infection changes viremia and CD4+ T-cell levels.
- Test whether experimental periodontitis and age reduce the efficacy of antiretroviral therapy against SIV, and whether severe periodontitis undermines control of infection in animals already on treatment.
More about the research
One asks how a metabolic fuel molecule, lactate, affects the brain; the other asks how gum disease interacts with infection and treatment.
Why it matters
People living with HIV on long-term antiretroviral therapy still develop neurocognitive impairment, for which there is no treatment, and they age with added co-morbidities. Showing that lactate and histone lactylation drive this damage could point to interventions such as lactate supplementation or probiotics to protect thinking and memory. The periodontitis studies could clarify whether gum disease reduces how well antiretroviral drugs control infection, informing dental care for this population and efforts to restore damaged gum tissue.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sowmya Yelamanchili
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Neuroscience
Examine neuron function and damage to synapses and mitochondria caused by combined HIV infection and methamphetamine exposure in 3D cerebral organoids containing microglia, the brain's immune cells.
Vijayakumar Velu
Emory University, GA·Microbiology & Immunology
Test how soluble IL-15/IL-15Rα-Fc, an immune-boosting cytokine complex, and galunisertib, a TGF-β pathway blocker, alone or combined, change T cell and natural killer cell subsets during chronic SIV infection in antiretroviral-treated rhesus macaques.
Matthew R. Reynolds
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how long virus takes to rebound after stopping antiretroviral therapy in rhesus macaques given defined reservoirs of 5x10^4, 1x10^4, 1x10^3 or 1x10^2 laboratory-generated, latently SIV-infected autologous cells.
The school
Tulane University of Louisiana: 17 labs on PI Pages, $276M a year on research, 187 research doctorates a year.
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