Caring Cross, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development of advanced medicines and enabling access to cures for all patients, everywhere, announced that Kim Anthony-Gonda, Ph.D., Director of Infectious Diseases at Caring Cross, presented a poster highlighting the organization’s Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T Cell Therapy at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) 2022.
The poster, presented on February 16 and titled, “Preclinical studies toward a Phase I/IIa trial using Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cell therapy,” highlighted results examining whether the Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cells, currently being developed for the clinical trial, could travel to the spleen of humanized mice with active HIV infection and inhibit replication of the virus. Data from the study concluded that intravenously administered Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cells travelled from the peripheral blood to the spleen and demonstrated potent and durable suppression of HIV replication after a single injection of Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cells.
“Currently, the only effective therapy for the treatment of HIV is lifelong adherence to drug cocktails which effectively suppress the virus but are not curative,” stated Dr. Anthony-Gonda. “In advancing our Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cell therapeutic candidate, Caring Cross is seeking to develop a curative treatment option that eliminates HIV-infected cells and safely suppresses HIV infection long-term in the body after a single infusion of Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cells. The research presented at CROI 2022 demonstrates the ability of the CAR-T cells to eliminate HIV-infected cells and suppress HIV infection in a humanized mouse model for the duration of the study. The study also successfully demonstrates clinical-scale manufacture of the Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cell product from people with HIV in preparation for the clinical trial.”
“Being able to present our data at CROI is an honor and the perfect setting to announce this important step forward in our work to develop, in concert with the community, a therapeutic approach to HIV infection,” said Rimas Orentas, Ph.D., Scientific Director of Caring Cross. “Caring Cross is now focused on supporting a Phase I/IIa clinical trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of our Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cell therapy in people with HIV with our clinical colleagues at UCSF and UC-Davis.”
The Phase I/IIa clinical trial has been cleared by the FDA and is supported by a grant from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04648046). A second grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports development of the technology behind this work, with a vision to expand affordable gene therapies to low- and middle-income countries in the future.