Wesley I. Sundquist, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry in the School of Medicine, has dedicated his career to learning how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) assembles and spreads from cell to cell. Understanding these processes may lead to new drugs that stop HIV from causing AIDS, the infectious disease that has killed more than 20 million people worldwide, including an estimated 500,000 in the United States.

Along with other U researchers, particularly biochemistry professor Christopher P. Hill, Ph.D., and scientists from Salt Lake City-based Myriad Genetics, Sundquist has made breakthrough discoveries in identifying and characterizing a key protein that helps HIV escape from cells, a process called budding. Without this protein, TSG101, the virus cannot spread in the body.

Sundquist also studies the structural organization of the virus itself. He and his colleagues have determined the structures of two of the viral structural proteins, MA and CA, which are key organizers of HIV. He also has used the three-dimensional structure of the CA protein, together with complementary biochemical and structural studies, to explain the structural organization of the virus core.

Identifying and understanding proteins is critical to develop drugs to attack HIV because drugs bind to proteins.  With 75 percent of U.S. HIV patients resistant to at least one drug, and 15 percent of new HIV infections drug-resistant, finding new drugs is paramount, according to Sundquist.
In his latest work, Sundquist and his colleagues, including Hill, determined the structure of another cellular protein, VPS4, which HIV must use to replicate and bud.

In 2003, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology honored Sundquist for his research with the Amgen Award, given for “significant achievements in the application of biochemistry and molecular biology to the understanding of disease.”