SANTHE’s Dr Zaza Ndhlovu awarded $650 000 research scholarship

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Dr Zaza Ndhlovu, Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE) Researcher/Supervisor and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the HIV Pathogenesis Programme (HPP) of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), has been selected for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) International Research Scholars Programme and awarded a five-year grant of $650 000.  He was one of 41 scientists selected, out of the 1 500 that applied from 16 countries worldwide. He is also one of only two successful applicants from the continent of Africa.

HHMI, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, established the Research Scholars Programme to help develop scientific talent in a wide variety of biomedical research fields and, in this round, awarded nearly $26.7 million in total. Ndhlovu elaborates, “The awards aim to support early-career scientists who are poised to advance biomedical research across the globe, offering them the freedom to pursue new research directions and creative projects that could develop into top-notch scientific programmes.”

Innovation is one of the imperative requirements of the programme and Ndhlovu answered this call by proposing the first study that seeks to, more precisely, determine the type of immune response needed to be induced by vaccination, or other immune based therapies, to protect against new infection or cure HIV infection. “The study will use a mouse model reconstituted with a human immune system to allow manipulation of the human immune systems in ways that cannot be done in humans. Selectively transferring different populations of predefined human killer immune cell subsets isolated from HIV infected persons into HIV infected mice, will lead to the discovery of the most potent HIV killer cell subsets. If successful, the results of this study will set the standard for the quality of immune responses needed to be elicited by a vaccine,” he said.Read more ...