Multispecific anti-HIV duoCAR-T cells display broad in vitro antiviral activity and potent in vivo elimination of HIV-infected cells in a humanized mouse model

Abstract

Adoptive immunotherapy using chimeric antigen receptor-modified T cells (CAR-T) has made substantial contributions to the treatment of certain B cell malignancies. Such treatment modalities could potentially obviate the need for long-term antiretroviral drug therapy in HIV/AIDS. Here, we report the development of HIV-1-based lentiviral vectors that encode CARs targeting multiple highly conserved sites on the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein using a two-molecule CAR architecture, termed duoCAR. We show that transduction with lentiviral vectors encoding multispecific anti-HIV duoCARs confer primary T cells with the capacity to potently reduce cellular HIV infection by up to 99% in vitro and >97% in vivo. T cells are the targets of HIV infection, but the transduced T cells are protected from genetically diverse HIV-1 strains. The CAR-T cells also potently eliminated PBMCs infected with broadly neutralizing antibody-resistant HIV strains, including VRC01/3BNC117-resistant HIV-1. Furthermore, multispecific anti-HIV duoCAR-T cells demonstrated long-term control of HIV infection in vivo and prevented the loss of CD4⁺ T cells during HIV infection using a humanized NSG mouse model of intrasplenic HIV infection. These data suggest that multispecific anti-HIV duoCAR-T cells could be an effective approach for the treatment of patients with HIV-1 infection.