Microbiome, mETabolites, and Alcohol in HIV to reduce CVD (META HIV CVD) Program Project Grant

We are excited to announce that URBAN ARCH investigators, Drs. Matthew Freiberg, Shirish Barve, and Kaku So-Armah were recently awarded a NIAAA program project grant (PPG) that will examine alcohol-associated gut dysbiosis and the association between gut dysbiotic metabolites and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors among people with HIV infection (PWH) who are heavy drinkers.

Project 1 will be conducted at Pavlov State Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia, the same site as our gut microbiome and metabolite studies (ACME HIV and TMAO HIV).

Project 2 will leverage the Veterans Aging Cohort Study, an observational cohort of veterans living with and without HIV.

The Projects will be supported by the Administrative, Education, and Analytic Support Core at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Integrated Metagenomics and Metabolomic Core at the University of Louisville’s Alcohol Research Center (ULARC). Biospecimens from Project 1 will be used to validate significant findings in Project 2. Metabolites significantly associated with alcohol and CVD in Project 2 will be explored in Project 1 to see if probiotics favorably impact the levels of those metabolites.

The META HIV CVD PPG will inform probiotics’ role as standard adjunctive therapy complementing alcohol interventions among PWH who are heavy drinkers, and will advance the understanding of how alcohol-associated gut dysbiosis and its metabolites contribute to CVD and death. Currently, the team is working on submitting IRB applications for both Projects 1 and 2, and the Project 1 team has begun working with Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center (BEDAC) to implement a data capture and participant tracking system.