The UW Institutional Center for WE-REACH is a NIH funded public-private partnership to provide value added education and support--including significant funding, project & administrative as well as regulatory & domain expert participation- for innovators to realize products with health impact.

The Targeted, Long-acting and Combination Anti-Retroviral Therapy (TLC-ART) program leverages innovations in drug combinations nano-technology, clinical and regulatory expertise to develop targeted HIV therapy that will be long-lasting and overcome drug insufficiency.

Translational research focusing on finding cure for cancer and HIV/AIDS through innovations in drug design, targeting, transport, delivery, disposition and overcoming resistance.

An interdisciplinary team led by Professors Rodney JY Ho of the UW School of Pharmacy and Ann Collier of the UW School of Medicine received $14M from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a long-lasting (7-day) therapy for HIV. The two co-Principal Investigators and the team will develop innovative treatments to overcome limitations of current oral drug therapies. The UM1 NIH grant is the only NIH funded long-acting therapeutic research and clinical development program as part of its key initiatives to address unmet medical need in HIV/AIDS. Dr. Ho was a recipient of the Milo Gibaldi Endowed Professorship, which funded part of the research in developing this program.The HIV virus is a formidable opponent for researchers. It constantly mutates, making it harder to create drugs for prevention and treatment. HIV lives not only in the blood stream, but in tissues, making it hard to eradicate from the body. It is possible to greatly reduce the presence of the virus in the blood, but finding a way to reduce its presence in tissues has been significantly more challenging.While current drug combination therapies have significantly improved the length and quality of patient life, they present two main challenges: 1) they must be taken one or more times a day lifelong; and 2) they are not as effective at removing residual viruses from tissues.

One of the three co-founder of Impel NeuroPharma.A technology developed in Dr Ho's laboratory @ University of Washington, Seattle, WA