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Immunotherapy-based approaches to cure HIV

Immunotherapy-based approaches to cure HIV

Open to students

HIV remains a global health priority. Approximately 39 million people currently live with HIV and 28 million of these are on life-long anti-HIV therapy. Despite suppressive anti-HIV therapy, HIV currently cannot be cured due to the persistence of latently-infected cells in people with HIV.

Novel immunotherapy approaches represent an exciting new avenue for HIV cure. These approaches combine potent anti-HIV antibodies with enhancement of natural immune responses against HIV-infected cells.

This project is focussed on developing an immunotherapy approach harnessing the potential of innate natural killer (NK) cells to eliminate HIV-infected cells.

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Open to students

We're developing immunotherapy-based strategies to target residual HIV-infected cells that persist in the body despite anti-HIV therapy as part of an approach to cure HIV. The objectives of this project include identifying the relevant NK subset which is the most potent killer of HIV-infected cells and developing anti-HIV antibodies with enhanced function which can help mediate antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity by NK cells.

Discoveries made in this project may be applicable not only to HIV cure approaches, but also more broadly to immunotherapies to target a range of chronic viral infections and cancer.

This project involves laboratory techniques including cell culture with primary human cells, immunophenotyping/flow cytometry, HIV infection (under PC3 conditions), and biostatistical analysis.