Summary
UCLA researchers in the Department of Medicine have developed a novel chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that targets T cells against HIV while protecting T cells from HIV infection.
Background
Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) are artificial T cell receptors that are designed bind to certain proteins on diseased cells, thus helping the T cells find and kill the target diseased cells such as virus-infected or cancer cells. A typical CAR has a binding domain, a segment of protein that binds to the target disease biomarker, that composes of a single chain antibody. However, other types of binding domains that interact with the viral envelope may have additional advantages for effective immunotherapy against HIV infection.
Innovation
UCLA researchers in the Department of Medicine have developed a novel CAR against HIV infection. In place of a single chain antibody, a viral decoy sequence serves as the binding domain. This sequence inhibits the coil-coil interaction of heptad repeat sequence in the viral envelope required for fusion of the virus to a cell during infection. This decoy sequence allows both function of the CAR to direct killing of an infected cell, as well as protection of the CAR-transduced T cells from infection by HIV, and thus serves dual purposes.
Applications
▶ HIV immunotherapies
▶ HIV cure
Advantages
▶ Novel binding mechanism
▶ Demonstrated efficacy in killing HIV-infected cells with lentiviral transduced CD8+ T cells
▶ Demonstrated protection of lentiviral transduced CD4+ T cells against HIV infection