Professor leads research team in groundbreaking discovery 

Aurelio Lorico, MD, PhD is lead author of a study with implications for HIV, cancer metastasis, Alzheimer’s, and more. 

Touro University Nevada — the state’s largest medical school and its only school of osteopathic medicine — recently hosted a press conference to share its role in groundbreaking global medical research. 

Aurelio Lorico, MD, PhD, Professor of Pathology at Touro University Nevada College of Osteopathic Medicine, is the lead author of a study published on Aug. 10 in Nature Communications — a journal that publishes high-quality research representing important advances of significance from all areas of the natural sciences. Researchers from Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York, the Biotechnology Center of Dresden University of Technology in Germany, and researchers from Italy contributed to the study. 

The study has identified a new pathway that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) creates and uses to enter the nucleus of a healthy cell, where it can then replicate and go on to invade other cells. The researchers also identified three proteins that are needed for the virus to carry out the invasion, and have, in turn, synthesized molecules (potential drugs) that can target one of the proteins, leading to new treatments for AIDS. As an entirely new pathway, the discovery may apply to many types of diseases, in particular cancer metastasis.