Pilot Award Recipient: Conrad Russell Cruz, MD, PhD

Although HIV infection can be controlled by daily lifelong adherence to expensive antiretroviral therapies it cannot presently be cured. Eradicating virus from a person will likely require the co-ordination of drugs that expose hidden viral reservoirs (latency reversing drugs) with the effective harnessing of multiple arms of the immune system. We are developing a potentially curative therapeutic platform of engineered killer T-cells that, upon triggering by latency reversing drugs, will direct three arms of the immune system against the viral reservoirs that the drugs will simultaneously expose.