WISTAR RESEARCHER AWARDED 2-YEAR GRANT BY FOUNDATION FOR AIDS RESEARCH

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 20 (Bernama) -- Wistar researcher, Dr Luis J. Montaner, in collaboration with Dr Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen, was awarded a Target Grant for US$397,663 over two years by amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. (US$1=RM4.29)

According to a statement, Dr Montaner, who leads The Wistar Institute’s HIV Research Program, is studying the ability of a type of immune cell known as natural killer (NK) cells to kill HIV-infected cells.

“This grant to Dr Montaner is the latest of several awards we have made to outstanding scientists at The Wistar Institute.

“Dr Montaner’s well-designed research project has significant potential for moving the HIV cure research field forward. We wish him and his team much success and look forward to receiving updates on their progress,” said amfAR Vice President and Director of Research, Dr. Rowena Johnston.

Meanwhile, Dr Montaner, who is vice president of Scientific Operations and principal investigator of the BEAT-HIV Delaney Collaboratory to Cure HIV said the Montaner lab tests immunotherapy approaches harness several arms of the immune response to win over HIV, including immunotherapy using NK cells.

“This new amfAR grant will allow us to initiate new work that will expand our ongoing studies so we can continue to achieve significant milestones in our research to test HIV cure strategies,” he added.

Dr Montaner and his team are studying whether immunotherapy using gene-modified NK cells that have shown to be effective in treating some forms of cancer have the same effectiveness in treating HIV.

His research relies on optimising NK cells to effectively find and kill HIV-infected cells by modifying them outside the body to better bind to antibodies once infused as cell therapy.

The approach will also include use of a strategy by the Abdel-Mohsen laboratory to alter antibodies to have greater potency in increasing NK cell killing.

Wistar is a member of the Delaney Collaboratory to Cure HIV-1 Infection by Combination Immunotherapy (BEAT-HIV Collaboratory), a consortium of more than 100 top HIV researchers working to test combinations of several innovative immunotherapies under new preclinical research and clinical trials, and one of the largest HIV-cure collaborations in the world.

-- BERNAMA