The John H. Tietze Foundation

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YOUR GIFTS IN ACTION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ANSCHUTZ MEDICAL CAMPUS

The John H. Tietze Foundation December 2020

Dear Eileen, Judy, Larry and Tyler: Thank you all very much for the Tietze Foundation’s generosity in funding our work. Your support makes our research possible, and I am pleased to share our progress with you. While still making great strides in our work on HIV-1 related to combating latent viruses, in the early months of 2020 we pivoted our efforts to focus on a fundamental topic related to SARS-CoV-2: bats are the animal reservoir for SARS, SARS-CoV-2 and several other lethal viruses. My colleague, James Morrison, and I were very pleased to see our additional work with bats pay off in discovery, and we published our research in September. We have been working on drugs to impact viral life cycles, including viral latency. Latency underlies both the inability to cure HIV-1 and the problem of reactivating latent herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), which virtually all of us have but in an unfortunate few, such as Mrs. Tietze, reactivates into the brain. Both of these viruses are massively pandemic and the latent DNA state is central for both. In collaboration with colleagues that include Drs. James Morrison, Mamuka Kvaratskhelia and others, we published a paper in the worldleading journal Science regarding our work on HIV-1. It describes an amazing new drug that behaves in an entirely new way against HIV. It acts on the incoming virus just after it enters a cell and before it integrates into the genome to establish latency, and it targets the viral capsid shell. This groundbreaking drug heralds an entirely new kind of treatment for clinicians to employ against HIV and illuminates key, relatively mysterious features of the HIV-1 life cycle. Science is one of the top two scientific journals in the world, and we are proud to see this major paper published, and the accrual of this and similar knowledge helps for all latent viruses. Your support was a key part of these discoveries. I hope you enjoy reading about the impact you have had on our work and on infectious diseases research in greater detail in the following pages. We are truly grateful to have you on our team in the effort to better understand – and better treat – infectious diseases. With gratitude,

Eric M. Poeschla, MD Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases Tim Gill Endowed Chair for AIDS Research


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