Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle): Bell, Thomas, J. PROJECT SUMMARY The development of effective treatments or cures for a wide range of diseases requires translational studies that are directly relevant to human pathophysiology. The use of human biospecimens plays a key role in accelerating scientific discoveries in HIV research by providing scientists with a direct experimental model system to advance understanding of HIV prevention, cure, co-morbidities, and therapeutic strategies. To address several complex issues facing HIV research, including viral persistence, latency and reactivation as well as optimizing preservation methods for human tissues, investigators require access to a unique resource that could provide rigorous and uniform collection of human biospecimens from defined cohorts of HIV positive donors to yield consistent and reproducible experimental results for inventive and groundbreaking studies. As a leading human tissue provider for the biomedical research community, the National Disease Research Interchange (NDRI) is a 501(c)(3), not-for-profit organization that remains at the forefront of coordinating biospecimen procurement to match the needs of advancing scientific experimental methodologies, enabling cutting-edge research. For over 30 years, NDRI has received NIH funding for the parent award to this administrative supplement, the Human Tissue and Organs for Research Resource (HTORR) U42 Grant Number: U42OD011158. To address larger scale and more complex projects in the field of HIV research that are beyond the scope of HTORR, NDRI is expanding its capabilities for the biospecimen collection to align with broader unmet or under represented needs in the field of HIV research. Our current Program Year (PY) 1 efforts include providing rigorous, large scale, uniform collection of human biospecimens from highly defined cohorts of HIV+ positive to optimize tissue preservation methods for HIV studies and to study viral persistence, latency and reactivation. The goal of our PY2 proposal is to continue developing and implementing a large-scale biospecimen collection program to provide ongoing support for high priority HIV studies for NIAID. To accomplish this goal, NDRI will: 1) lead the development of large scale (>120 aliquots per donor) and complex (>30 tissue types per donor) recovery projects, 2) identify and authorize highly defined cohorts of HIV+ donors, 3) collect relevant HIV+ donor data, 4) coordinate standardized biospecimen procurement, processing, and preservation, and 5) distribute biospecimens to Dr. Lane’s laboratory. In doing so, the biospecimen collection and preservation methods will be optimized to support the generation of high-quality, reproducible data for scientific review and publication. RELEVANCE Improving treatment for HIV infected patients or finding a cure requires access to high-quality human biospecimens that are suitable for analysis using the most challenging experiment...