The government will commit $30 million a year for five years to the project. The Philadelphia collaboration will get $4.6 million a year.
For years, with the world focused on getting treatment to millions of infected people and preventing further spread of the disease, the notion of a “cure seemed naive and overambitious,” said Luis J. Montaner, a Wistar scientist who will share leadership of the Philadelphia team. “People didn’t use the word.”
That has gradually changed, with major funding now being dedicated to finding a vaccine and an outright cure, although any possible success would be years in the future.
“A simple, safe and scalable cure for HIV would accelerate progress toward ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” Anthony S. Fauci, the NIH director, said in a statement announcing the teams, five days before the start of the international AIDS conference in South Africa.
In a departure from the way research is typically funded, the NIH requested proposals from large teams that would collaborate.
Wistar, an independent biomedical research center that will oversee the Philadelphia grant, has long been a leader in research on boosting the immune system to fight HIV. With the help of a molecule named pegylated interferon alpha 2b, Montaner said, HIV-positive patients who had required antiretroviral therapy have been able to control the virus for up to six months without the drugs.
A few blocks away, at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, gene therapy researchers were engineering T-cells, a key part of the immune system, to recognize and destroy the virus while not being obliterated themselves.
Penn’s work comes from the same group of scientists that is producing a form of immunotherapy considered to be one of the most promising mechanisms to attack cancer. The cancer research has gotten more attention but much of the work is related.
Advances “have ping-ponged back and forth” for the last 10 or 15 years, said James L. Riley, a research associate professor in microbiology, who was named co-principal investigator with Montaner.
A key goal of the collaboration is to see if the two methods could work together.
“Luis’ technology reduces the amount of HIV present,” Riley said of Montaner’s work with interferon. “The lower the virus when we put in T-cells, the better we will be able to control the infection long term. You would only have to be treated once.”
Each group expects to start clinical trials within one to two years.
Both researchers said that their long-term partnership with Philadelphia FIGHT has speeded up the work. The AIDS services organization has helped educate the community, leading to more successful recruitment for clinical trials.
FIGHT is one of six institutions, in addition to Penn and Wistar, that are collaborating on the Philadelphia-led effort, which includes 30 researchers nationwide. The team includes a research group at Johns Hopkins that first reported that HIV can persist in “reservoirs” even when antiretroviral therapy has driven the virus down to undetectable levels, Montaner said, allowing the infection to grow if treatment is stopped.
Scientists at Rockefeller University were recruited because of their report last year that they had developed a type of antibody that Montaner said might make immune responses more effective.
Also involved in the partnership are the VA San Diego Healthcare System, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Utah.
The NIH grant, officially part of the Martin Delaney Collaboratory: Towards an HIV-1 Cure, will provide $23 million over five years to the Philadelphia group. Montaner estimated that at least $18 million of that would remain in the city.
A smaller round of grants to what some refer to as scientific “dream teams” to cure HIV was made five years ago. The new $150 million round will go, in addition to Philadelphia, to teams based at George Washington University, the University of California, San Francisco, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Montaner said the emphasis has shifted toward finding a cure in recent years as treatment, which also prevents transmission, has proved possible, if woefully underfunded internationally.
Nearly a decade ago, a Merck trial of an HIV vaccine that many scientists had expected to be a new frontier failed abysmally. Around the same time, a man who became known as the Berlin Patient was cured of HIV through a series of treatments that, while not practical in most circumstances, proved that a cure was possible. Three years ago, President Barack Obama pledged to further support cure research.
“Cure became a reasonable goal” in the scientific community, Montaner said.
©2016 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
