The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has received a $16 million, five-year grant to study the virus that causes AIDS, the National Institutes of Health announced yesterday.

The funds will be used to establish the Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions. Dr. Angela Gronenborn, who chairs Pitt's department of structural biology, will direct the new center.

The center will work to better understand what happens when HIV proteins interact with cellular components of host cells. Doing so could help researchers learn more about how the virus can be stopped, Dr. Gronenborn said.

The other two NIH-funded HIV structural biology centers are led by Dr. Alan Frankel at the University of California San Francisco and Dr. Wesley Sundquist of the University of Utah.

"HIV is so challenging to treat because the virus is extremely adept at evolving resistance against therapies that target individual HIV proteins," said Dr. Ravi Basavappa, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences' program director for the new centers.

"Efforts by Dr. Gronenborn and her colleagues to identify and image pivotal virus-host cell interactions could forge new avenues for drug discovery."