HIV immunotherapy research at WIMR awarded prestigious Campbell Foundation grant 

The Westmead Institute for Medical Research has been awarded a US$100,000 grant from The Campbell Foundation to support pioneering HIV immunotherapy research led by Dr Gabriel Duette.

The funding will support a project designed to harness the immune system to better target HIV, focusing on parts of the virus that remain stable and are less likely to mutate.

While antiretroviral therapy can successfully control HIV, it does not eliminate the virus from the body. HIV can remain hidden in a dormant reservoir and return if treatment stops, meaning people living with HIV usually require lifelong medication.

Dr Duette’s research aims to address one of HIV’s greatest challenges: its ability to mutate and evade the immune system.

“This $100,000 grant from the Campbell Foundation accelerates our efforts to develop a therapy that can finally overcome HIV’s most powerful defense, its ability to mutate,” Dr Duette said.

“By redirecting the immune system toward the virus’s most vulnerable sites, we hope to move closer to durable, ART-free control of HIV,” Dr Duette said. ART-free control means keeping the virus suppressed without the need for lifelong daily medication.

The project will use insights from WIMR’s Immunoinformatics Analysis Pipeline, known as IMAP, developed by the Palmer Lab at WIMR. IMAP helps identify highly conserved regions of HIV, which are parts of the virus that remain relatively unchanged across variants.

Using this information, Dr Duette’s team will explore a gene therapy approach aimed at engineering CD8 T cells, also known as killer T cells, to better recognise and target these vulnerable regions of the virus.

Early data show that these hard-to-change regions of HIV remain stable even in the virus’s hidden reservoir. The research also indicates that people who naturally keep HIV under control tend to have stronger immune responses against these stable parts of the virus.

The Campbell Foundation’s Executive Director, Ken Rapkin, said the research could help support a new kind of treatment approach.

“This research could lead to a new kind of treatment where a person’s immune system keeps HIV under control without needing daily meds. If successful, this work will lay the foundation for a first-in-class immunotherapy capable of providing long-term HIV control,” Mr Rapkin said.

The Campbell Foundation supports clinical and laboratory research into the prevention, treatment and cure of HIV and AIDS, with a particular focus on promising and nontraditional avenues of research. Since 1995, it has supported more than 160 HIV research projects around the world.

Globally, an estimated 40.9 million people were living with HIV in 2025, with more than half living in eastern and southern Africa. Women and girls accounted for 51 per cent of people living with HIV worldwide, highlighting the continuing need for research that reaches the communities most affected. At WIMR, researchers are working across HIV cure strategies, improved treatments, vaccine development and prevention, with the aim of reducing the burden of lifelong treatment and improving quality of life for people living with HIV.

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