UNC will continue its innovative “kick and kill” initiative for eradicating HIV after being chosen to receive funding from The National Institutes of Health.

Over the next five years, UNC will receive funding of nearly $23 million after being chosen from a competitive application process by the NIH, according to a release from the university.

David Margolis, MD, Professor of Medicine at UNC and Principal Investigator of CARE (Collaboratory of AIDS Researchers for Eradication), said in a release that he believes CARE was chosen for funding for several reasons.

“As we seek to both do discovery science and progress new therapies, our long-standing collaboration with Merck was extremely productive. We have now developed a new and unique partnership with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which resulted in Qura Therapeutics,” Margolis said.

UNC and GSK announced the partnership behind Qura Theraputics in May 2015.

CARE was first funded in 2011 through its Martin Delaney Collaboratory program for HIV cure research. It was the first major funding initiative to focus on eradicating HIV from the body, according to a release.

The “kick and kill” initiative for curing HIV involves waking up latent or sleeping virus in the body and boosting the immune system. The plan is then to have the immune system to recognize the virus and eradicate it.

Margolis said that researchers will now be able to take what they have learned over the last five years into the next five years through this grant.

“Over the next five years we will develop better ways to detect, measure and reverse latency. We will find ways to pair latency reversal with clearance of the virus because these two parts of the strategy must work together,” Margolis said.

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