Council News Vol. 7, no. 2

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STAFF NEWS

NEW ON THE INTERNET: A DATABASE OF
COMPOUNDS SCREENED FOR ANTI-HIV ACTIVITY
NIAID's Division of AIDS has begun uploading a vast
drug development database on the Internet that will
ultimately contain more than 10,000 compounds.

The HIV database houses
chemical structures and biological data to improve the design of
anti-HIV agents.
Ultimately, the database will
furnish information on viral and
cellular targets and help investigators monitor chemotherapy of
HIV infection.
Until the entire database goes
online, DAIDS has uploaded
part of it at http://www.
niaid.nih.gov/daids/dtpdb/
default.htm as a pilot.
In the database, you can find
anti-HIV drugs by class, including the chemical structure,
chemical names, and in vitro
activity against different HIV
strains in different cell lines.
You can also view the cellular
toxicity of each drug. Compounds with negative as well as

positive anti-HIV activities are
included.
The five sections let investigators search in various ways, for
example, by the viral life cycle
and targets, cellular targets,
FDA-approved drugs, class, and
alphabetical order.
Many agents have links to a
database with drug resistance
data (courtesy of International
Medical Press).
DAIDS obtains the information
through continuous surveillance
of primary literature sources and
provides literature references so
users can find the original publications.
Please visit the pilot site and
send your comments and suggestions to Dr. Mohamed Nasr,
telephone: [phone],
e-mail: mnl [email protected].

Dr. Margaret Johnston,
former deputy director of
the Division of AIDS, is
returning to NIAID in
September to head its
vaccine research effort.
In her new job, Dr. Johnston
will ensure an integrated program for AIDS prevention,
including vaccines and topical
microbicides.
She will also act as liaison for
the vaccine research community, both intramural and
extramural, working closely with
the AIDS Vaccine Research
Committee and the NIH Office
of AIDS Research.
Dr. Johnston will serve in two
formal roles: associate director
of the Vaccine and Prevention
Research Program and assistant
director for HIV/AIDS vaccines, reporting directly to Dr.
Fauci in the latter role.
At Council, Dr. Fauci announced other staff changes.
Ms. Sarah Carr, former head of
NIAID's Office of Policy
Analysis, left to work on genetic
testing policy for NIH and
DHHS. Dr. Jane Kinsel is now
acting director of that office.
Dr. Fauci also named Dr.
Stephanie James acting deputy
director of the Division of
Microbiology and Infectious
Diseases. As previously announced, Dr. George Curlin is
now acting DMID director,
following the appointment of
Dr. John R. La Montagne as
NIAID deputy director.

Clarification

In our last newsletter, the article
"NIAID Launches Frontal
Attack on Staph" stated that
NIAID was supporting two new
grants to sequence strains of
Staphylococcus aureus: one to The
Institute for Genome Research
(TIGR) and the other to the
Oklahoma University Health

Sciences Center (OUHSC).
While that information is correct, we mentioned TIGR's plan
to release genome information
but not OUHSC's.
We would like to make clear that
OUHSC is also committed to a
timely release of genome data.