Immunocore has published key results for its new preclinical candidate for HIV, ImmTAV. This TCR-based immunotherapy has succeeded in targeting T-cells where HIV infection often ‘hides’ from drugs.
Just after presenting promising results from its leading candidate at ASCO 2016 (read our coverage here), Immunocore is making headlines in another area – infectious disease.
The UK-based Biotech has published key results of its HIV research in Nature‘s publication Molecular Therapy. Carried out in collaboration with the University of Oxford, the work outlines the application of TCR (a sort of sibling of CAR-T) to try to cure HIV.
While antiretrovirals have much improved the management of HIV, total cure is still currently out of reach for the 37 million people infected worldwide.
A major obstacle in finding a cure is to clear all the copies of HIV in the body (virus reservoirs). These copies persist in long-lived CD4+ T-cells,