Canada’s HIV moonshot to “tickle” the virus out of hiding

A Canadian research team could be on the brink of a giant leap forward for the treatment of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), which affects more than 40 million people globally – 65 per cent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Led by Eric Arts, the Canada Research Chair in HIV pathogenesis and viral control at Western University in London, Ont., the proposed solution combines two therapies to rid HIV from the body – and hopefully prevent its reoccurrence.

The project, which builds on Arts’s three-decades-long collaboration with Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Centre, a world leader in HIV research and treatment, has been awarded $24 million over six years, according to an announcement made on Oct. 23. It’s one of five 2026 New Frontiers in Research Fund Transformation grants, a federal program for large-scale projects addressing major challenges that have the potential to “realize real and lasting change.”

But curing HIV isn’t Arts’s sole goal; he and the cross-disciplinary, cross-Canada team – which includes researchers from the University of Manitoba and Université de Montréal, as well as Peter Zandstra, the founding director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Biomedical Engineering – also seek to address the inequity of global health delivery and care.

To do that, the team created Immunequity, a public–private collaboration that aims to determine how to manufacture, scale and deliver Canadian-developed therapies to anyone who needs them, including patients in low-income countries.

“With HIV, you live lifelong with treatment, and that means you can never stop taking your drugs,” says Arts, who explains that without a daily drug regimen, people die.

“For the low-income countries, it’s like we [North American governments and pharmaceutical companies] give them our hand-me-downs. We come up with a great combination of drugs and we tell them eight years later, ‘Oh, yeah, you can start taking these drugs now, too.’ We’re trying to break that cycle,’’ says Arts.

Current treatments revolve around a regimen of daily antiretroviral drugs that keep the HIV virus in check but don’t cure the patient. A latent form of the virus hides in dormant immune cells and can return if treatment is interrupted, which can and does occur.

The therapies Arts is developing are built on an HIV-like particle called HLP that aims to flush the hidden virus out. “What needs to be done is to tickle the immune system to release little bits of virus that are latent into circulation; then it can be attacked,” says Arts. Once exposed, these little bits can be destroyed by the patient‘s existing drug therapies.

That’s the first part of solving the HIV dilemma: ridding the virus from people. The second step is making sure that once it’s gone, it can’t come back – and that’s where bioengineer Peter Zandstra’s work comes in.

At his UBC lab, Zandstra has demonstrated that it’s possible to reliably produce human immune cells, known as helper T-cells, which make antibodies that can fight off disease and, for this particular project, neutralize HIV.

In addition to its treatment for HIV, Zandstra’s work engineering and replicating immune cells in a lab is also an important breakthrough because it could help lower the cost of producing these engineered cell therapies, known as “living drugs,” for diabetes, stem cell transplants and cancers such as leukemia.

“Cell therapy is a curative treatment for many diseases. However, [these] are effective but very expensive therapies and, in fact, the expense not only limits access to these therapies in resource-limited settings such as Africa but it also limits very much what we can think about even in Canada with the public-payer health-care system,” says Zandstra, who is also the chief science officer at the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, which helps commercialize and scale cell and gene therapies. Along with Western’s Pathogen Research Centre and Toronto-based SHC Therapeutics, it will consider how to manufacture, scale and ship the therapies to Uganda and around the world.

That’s likely to include developing automated bioreactors to grow the immune cells in temperature-controlled environments that reduce production times, plus monitoring systems to track environmental conditions during shipping.

Cell therapies require specialized transportation, storage and handling to maintain a specific cold temperature range – known as the cold chain – to preserve the potency and integrity of the treatment. This is of particular concern in Africa, where a lack of cold-storage infrastructure and unreliable power sources can endanger the treatment during transport.

Zandstra says this work could help with other diseases and treatments in Canada, where health-care treatment costs continue to rise. “There are huge synergies between the types of technologies and solutions that will develop in this grant for HIV and cures for that disease,” he says, “but many of the same technologies that would emerge could also help Canadians access [other] new therapies, reducing the cost of drugs.”