Philadelphia-led consortium is selected to tailor HIV curative strategies to participant
Philadelphia, PA, Aug. 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Wistar Institute announces the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted a five-year, $17 million research award to launch iCure Consortium to develop individualized “cure regimens” for HIV. The Wistar-led, iCure Consortium’s objective is to advance strategies to cure HIV through tailored personalized medicine.
“Today 38 million people still live with HIV worldwide, and 1.3 million contract the virus each year,” said Luis J. Montaner, D.V.M., D.Phil., iCure principal investigator, executive vice president of The Wistar Institute and director of Wistar’s HIV Cure and Viral Diseases Center. “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 six-part, individually-tailored therapy designed to wipe out the persistent viral reservoir that remains after antiretroviral therapy in an effort to deliver durable, drug-free remission. The project combines six advanced tactics—neutralizing antibodies, mRNA therapy, viral binders, engineered CAR-T and “Natural Killer” (NK) cells, and precision latency “wake-up” drugs—all designed against each patient’s unique virus.
“Ending HIV demands more than management—it demands eradication,” said Drew Weissman, M.D., Ph.D., iCure co‑principal investigator, 2023 Nobel Laureate and Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “This project now allows us to apply our breakthroughs in RNA therapy as part of a cure-directed strategy.”
How iCure Works
• Wake the latent virus
• Map and target unique weak spots with tailored antibodies
• Destroy infected cells using “super‑charged” CAR‑T and NK cells
• Enhance clearance and block relapse with bispecific binders
In the first step, researchers reactivate the virus in a sample of the participant’s blood and identify mutations that the participant has not yet developed antibodies against. They then develop a tailored antibody therapy cocktail specifically designed against these specific mutations.
In the next stage, researchers focus on preventing HIV from returning. To do this, they develop person-specific antibodies or small molecule binders that can act as “homing devices” — beacons that can lead immune cells to the latent virus. Then they genetically modify CAR-T cells and NK cells (immune cells that destroy viruses) to express or use these homing devices to better clear infected cells.