A Dual CRISPR Strategy Eliminates HIV in Humanised Mice

Professor Howard Gendelman / University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, and Professor Kamel Khalili / Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, Philadelphia

Professor Khalili holds a Ph.D in Microbiology from the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Following his PhD, he completed postdoctoral work in Molecular Biology at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia followed by sub-specialty training in Molecular Virology at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda. Over the course of his extremely productive career, he has held numerous faculty positions at universities throughout Philadelphia. Since 2011, he has held the title of Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Virology at the University of Milan in Italy, and he is also Honorary Professor at Ningxia Medical University in China. Since 2021, he has held the title of Laura H. Carnell Professor and Chair at the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Inflammation as well as Director of the Center for Neurovirology and Gene Editing at Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. His list of accomplishments is extensive; he has founded multiple centres for research as well as research departments in neuroscience and viral oncology in the United States. He has founded scientific journals and societies, and to date has raised more than $95 million in grant funding from the NIH and other agencies. This includes a recently funded Martin Delaney HIV Research Collaboratory grant that includes more than 15 investigators across eight organisations. His achievements have been recognised internationally by the granting of many highly prestigious awards that are too numerous to mention here.

Dr. Howard E. Gendelman is the Margaret R. Larson Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience, and Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Dr. Gendelman is credited in unravelling the functional immune alterations that induce metabolic changes and lead to neural cell damage in a range of chronic infectious disorders. Those discoveries have led to immune transformative therapeutics aimed at preventing, slowing, or reversing neural maladies currently in clinical trials. His work has also led to regulatory T cell-based immunotherapies for neurodegenerative disorders that are being tested in early clinical trials. He is a co-founder of Exavir Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology start-up focused on developing ultra-long acting nanotherapies for HIV/AIDS and other chronic diseases. His CRISPR work is more recently focused on the generation of lymphoid and brain-targeted lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), to facilitate HIV-1 gRNA entry into latent viral sites. His laboratory created decorated particles that more specifically target latently infected CD4+ T and myeloid cells in infected animals for translational applications. Dr. Gendelman obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences and Russian Studies with honours from Muhlenberg College and his MD from the Pennsylvania State University-Hershey Medical Center where he was the 1999 Distinguished Alumnus. He completed a residency in Internal medicine at Montefiore Hospital, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and was a Clinical and Research Fellow in Neurology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. He occupied senior faculty and research positions at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Center, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement in Military Medicine before joining the University of Nebraska Medical Center faculty in March of 1993.

Read our CMN interview with Professor Khalili and Professor Gendelman here.