Fayuan Wen

Current HIV/AIDS-Related Research Activities:

Earlier observations have suggested that SCD patients are protected from HIV-1 infection and that HIV-1 infection is inefficient in SCD PBMCs ex vivo. Recently, we performed a global analysis of gene expression in SCD PBMCs and report upregulation of antiviral genes using RNA-seq analysis. I performed Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) against the 47 genes that included known HIV-1 restriction and regulatory host factors revealed strong enrichment of these genes in the activated SCD PBMCs compared to the activated control PBMCs. These are important not only for HIV-1 field but also for SCD cure efforts as antiviral state of SCD patients may adversely affect lentivirus-based future gene therapy efforts.