“Dr. Larry Corey wins $2.6 million grant to explore using CAR T cells for HIV cure”

Fred Hutch virologist and leading HIV researcher Dr. Larry Corey has received a $2.6 million grant from Gilead Sciences Inc. to investigate using CAR T cells — a type of immunotherapy — to bring about a cure or long-term remission for HIV.

“HIV creates such a persistent immune deficiency that one needs to improve the human immune response to develop an approach in which one’s own immune system can control the virus from replicating,” Corey said. “We think that we can bring the technology of genetically altering T cells, as is being used with cancer immunotherapy, to HIV.”

The grant will complement the CAR T-cell research that Corey is leading as part of the federally funded defeatHIV, a public-private research group based at Fred Hutch. The group in July received its second round of funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, allowing it to expand into exploring CAR T and other immunotherapies against HIV.

Fred Hutch already is known for its research into using CAR T cells to target cancer. Patients’ own T cells — a type of white blood cell that searches out and destroys pathogens — are genetically re-engineered with synthetic receptors called chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, to kill cancer cells bearing a particular marker. There are now dozens of clinical trials underway at Fred Hutch and elsewhere of CAR T cells for treating leukemia and lymphoma, with promising early results.

The Gilead funding will enhance preclinical work to help determine whether current T-cell technologies can overcome the “significant challenges” that HIV poses, Corey said.

Working with him on the project, which is funded over three years, will be immunology and infectious disease experts Drs. David Rawlings and Thor Wagner of the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s; immunologist Dr. Louis Picker and his research group at Oregon Health & Science University; and Seattle-based biotech company Juno Therapeutics.

Corey is founder and head of the Hutch-based, global HIV Vaccine Trials Network and former president and director of Fred Hutch. Early in his career, his work on the first antiviral treatment for herpes paved the way for HIV therapies that in 1996 turned the virus from a certain death sentence to a chronic disease. But while antiretroviral drugs lower the level of HIV to undetectable levels, they are not a cure. The virus persists in a dormant state in “reservoirs” throughout the body. If therapy is stopped, HIV roars back.

The Gilead grant to Corey’s team was among a dozen totaling more than $22 million awarded by the pharmaceutical giant to HIV-cure researchers and nonprofit community groups.

Reference: Fred Hutch