Led by Luis J. Montaner, D.V.M., D.Phil., Wistar Executive Vice President and director of the HIV Cure and Viral Diseases Center, and in collaboration with the lab of James L. Riley, Ph.D., professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, the team published the results in their paper, “Gene-modified NK Cells Expressing CD64 and Pre-loaded with HIV-specific BNAbs Target Autologous HIV-1 Infected CD4⁺ T Cells by ADCC,” in The Journal of Immunology.

NK cells are unlike T cells in that, until now, they did not naturally attack specific targets. To overcome this challenge and confer greater killing specificity by NK cells, Dr. Montaner and his team genetically modified NK cells to express CD64, a protein not normally expressed by NK cells. CD64 has greater binding activity for holding onto antigen-specific antibodies (which is critical for effective targeting) than any other molecule that naturally occurs on NK cells.