The National Institutes of Health recently awarded Philadelphia-based Wistar Institute, a biomedical researcher with expertise in cancer research and vaccine development, a five-year, $17 million HIV research grant.
Funding will be used to launch iCure Consortium with the goal of advancing strategies to cure HIV through tailored personalized medicine. It will further the research groundwork laid by Philadelphia-based BEAT-HIV Martin Delaney Collaboratory, a consortium of more than 95 leading HIV researchers co-led by Dr. Luis Montaner.
Montaner, who is The Wistar Institute executive vice president, Wistar HIV Cure and Viral Diseases Center director, and iCure principal investigator, called the grant a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”
“Today 38 million people still live with HIV worldwide, and 1.3 million contract the virus each year,” Montaner said. “For the first time, this grant brings our best team together working towards a cure tailored to each participant by pairing the latest in neutralizing antibody and cell-therapy breakthroughs against the unique, person-specific features of HIV.”
iCure Consortium will test a therapy designed to wipe out the persistent viral reservoir that remains after antiretroviral therapy. The project combines six tactics to designed therapies specific to each patient’s unique virus. The tactics are neutralizing antibodies, mRNA therapy, viral binders, engineered CAR-T and Natural Killer cells, and precision latency wake-up drugs.