Lillehoj Receives Two NIH Grants for HIV and Chagas Testing | Mechanical Engineering

Pierre Lillehoj received two grants from the National Institutes of Health to develop improved diagnostic tests for two often incurable diseases – HIV and Chagas disease.

“HIV remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. Transmission is now largely driven by severely infected people who are unaware of their status and those who are already receiving antiretroviral therapy but whose viral load is not suppressed,” said Lillehoj, Shankle Chair and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. (MECH) to Rice.

With the $1.37 million grant, Lillehoj will work to develop a CRISPR-Cas13-based rapid HIV-1 test.

Currently available rapid tests do not have the sensitivity to detect HIV in the early stages of acute infection. Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) can detect the virus as early as five to 10 days after transmission and are the best diagnostic tools currently available.

“But NAATs are laborious and time-consuming and rely on expensive instruments and refrigerated components, which hampers their use in self-testing,” Lillehoj said. “Our goal is to develop a CRISPR-Cas13-based, shelf-stable, instrument-free rapid test for the highly sensitive detection of HIV in blood or saliva.”

“We want to offer a streamlined workflow that can be done at home, similar to rapid COVID-19 antigen self-tests.”

His collaborators on the HIV project are Xue “Sherry” Gao, TN Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Philip Kortum, associate professor of psychological sciences; Jason Kimata and Dr. Thomas Giordano at Baylor College of Medicine.

Chagas disease is a tropical disease endemic to Latin America but detected with increasing frequency in the United States. It is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi) and transmitted by insect bites.

With the $435,000 grant, Lillehoj will work with Dr. Rojelio Mejia of Baylor College of Medicine to develop a serological test that can detect all geographic variants of the disease.

Diagnosis of Chagas disease is difficult because patients may be asymptomatic or present with nonspecific symptoms. If left untreated, the acute infection progresses to a chronic phase in which between 20 and 40 percent of patients will develop life-threatening disease, including cardiomyopathy, heart failure, and cardiac arrest.

“Existing serology tests are often inconclusive or give false negative/positive results,” Lillehoj said. “The World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization recommend tests using at least two different serological techniques to diagnose Chagas infection. In the United States, discrepancies in results require that the sample be forwarded to the Centers for Disease Control for further testing to confirm the diagnosis.

The process is long and expensive. The goal of the project is to develop a serological test to detect all geographic variants of Chagas disease, using carefully designed recombinant T. cruzi antigens for highly specific detection of all subtypes.

In 2019, an estimated 6.5 million people worldwide had Chagas disease, with some 173,000 new infections and 9,490 deaths each year.

Lillehoj earned a BS in MECH in 2006 from Johns Hopkins University and an MS and Ph.D. in MECH from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He joined the Rice faculty in 2020.