How Our Grants Make a Difference

In March 2018, The Campbell Foundation awarded a $100,000 grant to Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen, Ph.D., assistant professor in Wistar’s Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center in Philadelphia.

He and his team were studying the role of altered host glycosylation (the process of adding sugar molecules to proteins and its effect on immune function), in the development of HIV-associated comorbidities, specifically those related to inflammation, such as heart disease and dementia. They used the funds to test the hypothesis that the type of carbohydrate structures attached to cells contributes to the increase in chronic inflammation that leads to higher rates of non-AIDS inflammation-related illnesses.

Recently. Dr. Abdel-Mohsen let us know how much that grant meant to him.

“As you can imagine, having a new lab and trying to think outside the box and work on a very novel and innovative angle is not easy. These early funds from The Campbell Foundation allowed us to generate data that we used in early publications, adjust our research orientations, and get more funding from NIH and others, given the great promise of our work,” he wrote in a note to our foundation.

The funding, he said, was “essential and contributed to the entire program on the host glycosylation machinery and HIV persistence/immunopathogenesis we are trying to build and emphasize.”

The Campbell Foundation’s mission is to fund novel research and provide seed money to researchers that gets them started down the path toward finding a cure for HIV/AIDS. Without donations from our supporters, researchers such as Dr. Abdel-Mohsen might never get the chance to test their theories.