Keith Jerome has one year to spend $100,000.

But the UW associate professor of laboratory medicine isn’t going to buy a new car. He is going to use his grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to try to find a cure for HIV.

“I think this is an important problem and we have a chance to really make a difference,” Jerome said.

The grant is part of the Grand Challenges Explorations grant program that includes a $100 million fund distributed during five years for research of health issues affecting the global community.

“It is part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, which is supported by the Gates Foundation to achieve major breakthroughs in global health,” Gates Foundation member Becky Meisels said.

However, these grants are not given to just any researcher.

“The grants are given to researchers working on novel and potentially ground-breaking ideas that are off the beaten path,” Jerome said.

Jerome’s plan involves a new class of protein called homing endonucleases, proteins that are able to recognize and cut up specific sequences in DNA. He wants to change the specificity of these proteins so they can recognize the viral part of the DNA and then can introduce that into a person that has HIV. The idea came to him a little more than a year ago.

“The thing that makes HIV such a bad disease is that it actually put itself in your chromosomes,” Jerome said.

The current HIV treatments available cannot target the part of the virus that has integrated itself into the chromosome.

Jerome has worked with viruses for a long time, including work on the herpes virus, which is very similar to the HIV virus in that both viruses permanently inhabit the body.

“The idea really first came about generically when we were thinking about the latent viruses,” Jerome said.

The Gates Foundation helped jumpstart the idea into an actual plan.

“The one thing I would say is that for all of us who have gotten these Gates awards, I think there is a tremendous gratitude to the foundation for this,” Jerome said.

He added that during such a tough time in the economy, it is amazing to have this foundation as a source of funding.

The $100,000 grant Jerome received is for one year. At the end of the year, the foundation will look at the progress and re-evaluate the project. In the world of science, a year isn’t a very long time and it’s barely enough time to see if the ideas will work or not.

“At the end of the year, hopefully we will find funding to continue,” Jerome said.

The Gates Foundation has identified 12 areas as “grand challenges” that affect the world. Studies on an HIV cure is one of those areas.

“I applied for that one and basically our approach is a new way that offers the possibility of a cure for people with HIV,” Jerome said. “Not just a treatment, but a way to get the virus out of the body.”

Jerome and his research team are very optimistic about this project.

“This is all really working out,” he said.

Reach reporter Lia Pittman at news@dailyuw.com.