The Campbell Foundation
Helping Make HIV/AIDS History Since 1995
Press Releases 2026
The Campbell Foundation Awards University of Florida Researcher
$75,000 Grant to Advance Long-Acting HIV Grant Therapy
Mauricio Martins, Ph.D., of the University of Florida has received a $75,000 Campbell Foundation grant to study why some individuals respond differently to a long‑acting HIV gene therapy. The project will examine early immune reactions that may weaken the effectiveness of AAV‑delivered broadly neutralizing antibodies. As the release explains, “The funding will support research into why some patients respond differently to a promising gene therapy designed to provide long-term protection against HIV.” His team is developing a single‑dose approach that uses a harmless virus to teach muscle cells to produce HIV‑fighting antibodies, potentially reducing reliance on lifelong antiretroviral therapy for the 40.8 million people living with HIV worldwide. While newborn rhesus macaques show strong, lasting protection, older animals sometimes develop anti‑drug antibodies that undermine the treatment.
The Campbell Foundation funded the project because it tackles a major barrier to durable HIV therapies. Insights from this work could strengthen long‑acting bNAb treatments and improve gene therapy safety across many diseases.
The Campbell Foundation Awards a $100,000 Grant to Support
Breakthrough HIV Immunotherapy Research
The Campbell Foundation has awarded a $100,000 research grant to scientists at The Westmead Institute for Medical Research (WIMR) in Australia to support the development of a novel HIV immunotherapy aimed at overcoming the virus’s ability to mutate and evade the immune system. Led by Dr. Gabriel Duette, the project focuses on engineering CD8 T cells to target highly conserved regions of HIV identified using WIMR’s Immunoinformatics Analysis Pipeline (IMAP), a tool designed to pinpoint viral regions that remain stable across HIV variants. Current HIV treatments effectively suppress the virus but cannot eliminate the dormant viral reservoir, requiring lifelong therapy. The WIMR team is developing a gene therapy approach that equips immune cells to recognize and attack the parts of HIV least able to change. Early findings suggest these conserved viral targets remain stable even within the hidden HIV reservoir and that individuals who naturally control HIV exhibit stronger immune responses against them. “This research could lead to a new kind of treatment where a person’s immune system keeps HIV under control without needing daily medications,” said Campbell Foundation Executive Director Ken Rapkin. If successful, the project could lay the groundwork for a first-in-class immunotherapy capable of providing long-term HIV control, while future development efforts will focus on creating scalable, broadly accessible approaches for clinical use
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have received an $85,000 grant from The Campbell Foundation of Fort Lauderdale to study why a small number of people can naturally control HIV without medication and how those insights could lead to new ways to reduce HIV-related illness and transmission around the world.The project is led by Dr. Susan Eshleman, MD, PhD, a professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins and a long-time leader in HIV research. The study focuses on antibodies that appear in some people before they become infected with HIV, which may help their immune systems keep the virus at very low levels after infection.