Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and GlaxoSmithKline are homing in on a breakthrough in the fight against AIDS; one that has remained out of reach: finding a cure. This partnership between the private company and the public university will marry the longstanding work of each entity to hopefully arrive at more than has seemed possible in even the recent past.
The new HIV Cure center will be located at UNC. Intellectual property issues and other business concerns will be managed by a new company, Qura Therapeutics LLC. This move follows Glaxo's decision to maintain its interest in Viiv Healthcare which is jointly owns with Shionogi & Co. of Japan and Pfizer. Glaxo has committed $20 million in the next five years.
Andrew Witty, CEO of Glaxo, indicates that the company will continue to direct its energies toward a new generation of HIV therapies.
"HIV is a very major part of this company," Witty says. Witty points out that the launch of two new HIV drugs by Viiv points toward an optimistic outlook for the company. "We're going to be very ambitious to try to make a big difference."
Scientists have fresh hope that a cure for HIV can be found soon. When the first HIV patient was cured in 2009 via a bone marrow transplant the medical community was stunned at the results, and with rapid advancement in biotechnology researchers have been more confident that some kind of cure, whether a total eradication or long-term remission, is coming soon.
The 2009 case was called "the Berlin patient" in scientific circles, but this patient has now been identified as Timothy Ray Brown. Brown's cure was especially notable because of the serious risks inherent to the bone marrow procedure. However, since he narrowly survived the operation, doctors have not seen any sign of HIV in Brown's body.
"I became delirious, nearly went blind, and was almost paralyzed," Brown wrote in the journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses this year. "I eventually learned to walk again at a center for patients with extreme brain injuries."
The fact that a cure looks more attainable now than in past years has prompted more funding for research. This partnership will allow UNC scientists to help the Glaxo team to create new products.
The road forward has been rocky. The search is not simply for a cure, but also for whatever therapies will be necessary to enable the cure. These kinds of therapeutic techniques are complex, highlighting the need for collaboration between industry and academia. Dr. David Margolis, UNC professor of medicine and the director-to-be of the HIV Cure Center emphasizes the importance of collaboration.
Therapies that demand both techniques and drug combinations must be developed and tested in tandem. "It's not clear how one company would do that," Dr. Margolis says.
"Efforts toward a cure will be less often marked by breakthroughs than by incremental advances. Eventually therapies may bear little resemblance to what is currently being tested or considered."
For the past twenty years scientists have known that HIV goes dormant; they hide in immune-system reservoirs that are impervious to antiretroviral drugs. UNC has been on the forefront of the hunt to push the virus out of dormancy, enabling drug therapy.
Carol Folt, the Chancellor of UNC, is enthusiastic about the partnership and believes it is likely to expand. "I see this as us really putting our muscle behind a pressing issue," Folt says, calling an HIV cure "an extraordinary scientific challenge."
This partnership is an important development for HIV research because it signals the willingness of big pharma to invest in intellectual property that may produce a potentially world-changing drug. The team of 20 full-time scientists from UNC and Glaxo are likely to be at the forefront of any major discoveries.
UNC professor of medicine Myron Cohen, who leads the university's infectious diseases program, said: "This is a concerted, Manhattan Project-style effort to help find the cure for AIDS. The provocative idea is now mature enough for industry to say, 'We want to be in this and make the discovery.'"
About 35 million people world-wide were infected with HIV in 2013. That same year about 1.5 million people around the world died of AIDS-related causes.
