What’s on the Treatment and Cure Horizon for HIV and Cancer?
Researchers testing innovative technologies and therapeutic strategies that have applications across multiple diseases are making meaningful progress
By Andrea Gramatica, PhD
January 26,2026
Summary
- Scientists are making steady progress toward better treatments for cancer and HIV. New research focuses on using the immune system to fight these diseases in smarter and faster ways.
- One major area of progress is cell therapy, especially CAR T cells. These are immune cells changed to attack cancer or HIV. Researchers are now trying to modify these cells directly inside the body, which could make treatment faster, cheaper, and easier to use around the world.
- Personalized mRNA technology is also advancing. These treatments are designed for each person and have already shown success in some cancer patients. The same tools are now being used in HIV research to help find and target hidden virus in the body.
- Antibody and vaccine technologies are also progressing. Special antibodies can block many types of HIV, and new vaccine strategies aim to train the immune system to make strong, long-lasting protection.
Looking at what’s happened in immunotherapy and HIV virology over the past couple of years, there are real reasons to be excited. The science is moving incredibly fast, and we’re seeing game-changing shifts in how we approach treatment, especially for cancer and HIV.
Cell therapy and CAR T cell approaches
CAR T cells are patient’s own immune T cells that are engineered to have a “special device” called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that equips the T cells to specifically recognize and kill cancer or infected cells.
The current processes to generate CAR T cells involve collecting cells from a hospitalized patient, shipping them to an external lab to engineer them, shipping them back, and re-infusing them into the patient. This process works, sometimes spectacularly, but it’s also slow, expensive, and difficult to scale.
That’s why one of the most important changes happening right now is an approach that moves the entire engineering lab directly inside the body of the patient. Instead of building CAR T cells in a lab, scientists are developing strategies to generate CAR T cells in vivo. Multiple research groups have already shown it’s possible to generate powerful immune activity using different types of engineered nanoparticles, minuscule oil droplets that are used to deliver drugs or other materials to cells in vivo.
The question for 2026 is whether we’ll see truly convincing human datasets showing controlled delivery, acceptable safety profiles, and effects durable enough to matter clinically.
In a recently awarded amfAR Target Grant, Drs. Rachel Rutishauser and Brad Jones are pursuing an in vivo immune-cell engineering strategy to target HIV-infected cells designed to bypass external manufacturing. The core idea, which partially borrows ideas from the cancer field, is to deliver a gene-editing technology directly to T cells in the body. This project is a concrete attempt to bring the potential of CAR T cell therapy into HIV, where the need for scalable, deployable interventions is a priority.
Personalized mRNA technology
Personalized mRNA vaccination is also advancing, with randomized clinical data now available. In KEYNOTE-942, an individualized mRNA neoantigen vaccine given together with a checkpoint inhibitor in resected high-risk melanoma—a type of cancer treated by surgically cutting out the tumor—was associated with improved outcomes.
Beyond this specific indication, recent advances in this area have contributed to better workflows for tumor sequencing and immune monitoring, two methods that help determine treatment progress. These capabilities are relevant across immunotherapy areas, including HIV vaccine and cure research, where progress often depends on reliable sensitive readouts of immune responses.
This convergence is one reason amfAR funded a Target Grant led by Drs. Sharon Lewin and Thumbi Ndung’u to develop lipid nanoparticles that deliver mRNA payloads specifically to T cells in order to reverse HIV latency, with explicit attention to the diversity of HIV strains around the world.
The immediate goal is scientific: Can we get the right payload into the right cells efficiently and safely? The broader goal is strategic: build delivery and monitoring capabilities that can be reused across interventions.
Antibodies and vaccines
Two related lines of HIV research are making incremental progress by trying to work with how the immune system actually behaves. First, researchers are testing broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAb), which are lab-made versions of the kinds of antibodies that, in some people, can block many different strains of HIV. Because HIV mutates quickly, one antibody is often not enough, so recent studies have focused on using combinations of these antibodies and, in some cases, more complex engineered versions designed to cover more viral variants and reduce the chance the virus “escapes.”
Early clinical trials, including a study that tested three antibodies together with a carefully monitored pause in standard treatment, are part of this effort, and broader reviews show a growing number of human studies exploring how best to use these tools.
In parallel, HIV vaccine researchers are pursuing “germline targeting,” a strategy that aims to start an antibody response from the very first rare immune cells capable of eventually maturing into broadly neutralizing antibody-producing cells. Early human trials have shown that certain vaccine designs (including protein nanoparticles and mRNA-based delivery) can “prime” these starter cells as intended; the major next step is whether a planned sequence of follow-up boosts can reliably steer that early response toward strong, broad protection.
No single line of work among those presented here guarantees a cure next year for cancer or HIV. But older platforms are becoming more scalable, more testable, and more reproducible, and it represents the kind of progress that tends to precede meaningful clinical advances.
Dr. Gramatica is amfAR’s vice president and director of research.
Contact:
Robert Kessler (he/him)
Program Communications Manager
amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
robert.kessler@amfar.org
Source: amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
https://www.amfar.org/news/whats-on-the-treatment-and-cure-horizon-for-hiv-and-cancer/
"Reproduced with permission - amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research"
amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
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