UPDATE: Drug Firms, US Academia To Partner On HIV Projects

Merck & Co. (MRK) and Sangamo BioSciences Inc. (SGMO) will join separate projects led by U.S. academic institutions to develop new approaches toward eradicating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The academic institutions in the partnerships are receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health totaling more than $14 million a year for up to five years, the NIH said Monday.

The collaborations are among the latest in a string of partnerships between drug firms and academia, including Gilead Sciences Inc.'s (GILD) four-year cancer-therapy project with the Yale School of Medicine.

The NIH-funded projects will generally target what are known as HIV reservoirs--cells and tissues where the virus remains latent and not susceptible to current treatments known as antiretrovirals.

Merck, Whitehouse Station, N.J., will join a new project led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that will look for ways to purge persistent infection of the virus from the body. The research team includes 19 investigators from UNC and eight other U.S. universities. First-year funding from the NIH is $6.3 million, the NIH said.

At the same time, Merck will work with researchers at the University of California San Francisco, plus collaborators from other universities, on a five-year project to define HIV's reservoirs, better understand the reservoirs and test potential treatments for the virus. First-year funding from NIH for the UCSF-led project is $4.2 million.

Merck is the sole pharmaceutical industry partner for the UNC- and UCSF-led projects.

"Collaboration has been the hallmark of much of the progress made against HIV since the virus was first identified 30 years ago," Merck Research Laboratories Vice President Daria Hazuda said.

In Sangamo's partnership with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, researchers will attempt to develop proteins to attack HIV reservoirs, and study whether a patient's immune cells can be made resistant to the virus. First-year funding is $4.1 million.

Neither Merck nor Sangamo will receive federal funds for their contribution to the research, the NIH said.

Merck shares fell 1.4% to $35.61, while Sangamo was off 4% at $5.99.

-Peter Loftus, Dow Jones Newswires; +1-215-982-5581; peter.loftus@dowjones.com

--Drew Fitzgerald contributed to this article.

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