Dr Chantelle Ahlenstiel from the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney has been awarded an $875,000 National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Ideas Grant, to undertake research on RNA therapeutics for an HIV cure.
Announced yesterday by the Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler, the NHMRC Ideas Grants help drive novel solutions to health challenges.
HIV is a major public health burden, affecting more than people globally. While current antiretroviral treatment for HIV is very effective, it needs to be taken regularly for life, as the treatments are not able to prevent the virus establishing a ‘latent reservoir’ in immune cells. In order to develop an HIV cure, researchers need to target viral replication in the latent reservoir.
“Using short interfering RNA - or siRNA - we have previously developed a potential therapeutic that can block viral replication and lock it into a super latent state where it no longer reproduces itself or trigger the immune system, however currently this effect does not last long enough. Thanks to this Ideas Grant, we will undertake research to enhance this potential therapeutic by developing self-amplifying mRNA to achieve long-term suppression,” explains Dr Ahlenstiel.
The proposed Self-amplifying mRNA Antiviral RNA Therapeutics (or SMART) platform will also enhance the delivery method for the therapeutic by using modified nanoparticles that will help the therapeutic bind to the target cells. Once developed, the therapeutic will be tested in humanised mouse models, and then progress to human proof of concept clinical trials if successful.
Professor Anthony Kelleher, who is the Director of the Kirby Institute, is also an Associate Investigator on the study. “HIV is an incredibly complex virus. While we are still some way from finding an HIV cure, Dr Ahlenstiel’s SMART platform presents an exciting an opportunity as it has the potential to effectively target and deliver treatments to the latent reservoir. I congratulate her on this grant, and I look forward to working with her to undertake this important research,” he said.
This grant is a collaboration between the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney, Imperial College London, University of California Los Angeles, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and UNSW’s RNA Institute.