PISCATAWAY, NJ—Dr. Eddy Arnold, a professor at Rutgers University, was awarded an anticipated $10.1 million dollars in federal funding for his work in anti-HIV research, according to a report on NJ.com.Â
The Rutgers chemist’s research team also consists of professors Joseph Marcotrigiano, Roger A. Jones, and Ronald M. Levy. Together they secured a $6.3 million dollar grant over a span of five years from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Arnold and his team also received the NIH’s Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) award, consisting of an additional $3.8 billion dollars, over a second five-year period, from 2014-2019.
Rutgers’ anti-HIV research team focuses on developing knowledge about, and creating new remedies for, dieses like AIDS and influenza.
Arnold told Rutgers Today, “The research will focus on aspects of the HIV structure/function that relate to viral assembly and maturation, drug design, and drug resistance.”
Arnold discussed the importance of his team’s research in the development of medicine and its access to patients:
“In the 30 years since the virus appeared on the scene, we have gone from having no medication to having 26 drugs on the market. Our challenge remains to provide the most effective therapy and to get it to people in need in a cost effective way.”
With the research being so large in scale, including examiners from other universities such as Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh, the grant is administered by Professor Arthur Olson of the Scripps Research Institute based in La Jolla, CA.
This grant is the second that Eddy Arnold has received for his research.
Dr. Arnold developed two FDA approved pharmaceutical drugs more than twenty years ago, Intelence and Edurant, in partnership with Dr. Paul Janssen, founder of Janssen Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson,Â
Arnold has since co-founded Prodaptic Pharmaceuticals with his Rutgers contemporaries, where he uses a “structured arrangement drug design platform” to discover new medicines geared towards infectious diseases.
Jad is a local writer, organizer, and life-long resident of New Brunswick. He is a graduate of both Rutgers University and The University of Toronto.
