Caring Cross – CAR-T as a Potential Cure for HIV

Caring Cross is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development of advanced medicines and ensuring access to cures for all patients, everywhere. To enable its mission, Caring Cross is mobilizing a growing community of healthcare professionals, scientists, engineers, community advocates, donors, investors and business leaders to support the development of technologies and candidate medicines and technologies. Currently, Caring Cross is advancing several initiatives that aim to improve the accessibility, affordability and applicability of CAR-T technology and stem cell gene therapy. These opportunities include developing and implementing affordable solutions for the manufacture of CAR-T cells, advancing a decentralized, place-of-care cell manufacturing model, and developing its first therapeutic candidate, an anti-HIV duoCAR-T cell therapy designed to suppress HIV replication and eliminate HIV-expressing cells in people with HIV. A stem cell gene therapy for Sickle Cell Disease and Beta-Thalassemia is also in development. For more information on Caring Cross visit https://caringcross.org/

Boro received his PhD from the University of Western Australia and his MBA from the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He has been in the gene therapy field since the late 1980s.

After a Fogarty Fellowship at the NIH, he joined the faculty at JHU where he worked on developing Lentiviral vectors as delivery systems for gene therapy. After 4 years in academia, he founded his first company ViRxSys and led the team that first demonstrated the safety of Lentiviral vectors in humans with his UPenn colleagues. Later he founded Lentigen, which first developed the Lentiviral vector used to produce Kymriah™, the first FDA-approved gene therapy product.

Later, Boro saw an opportunity to integrate Lentiviral vector technology with closed-system automated cell processing devices to enable distributive place-of-care manufacturing at hospitals, potentially improving the affordability and accessibility of gene therapy products like CAR-T cells. He therefore spearheaded the acquisition of Lentigen by Miltenyi Biotec in 2014 and led the development of a global place-of-care network of clinical centers that were able to successfully manufacture CAR-T cell products and demonstrate their therapeutic benefits in clinical trials.

Seeing a need for improved business models to support the affordability and accessibility of gene therapy products, Boro co-founded Caring Cross and serves as the Executive Director.