Aubust 15, 2024

South Africa is the epicenter of the worldwide HIV pandemic with about 20% of the population living with HIV. Despite availability of free anti-retroviral therapy (ART) has since 2004, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) orals made part of healthcare guidelines since 2016, HIV/AIDS remains one of the most serious health concerns facing South Africa and the African continent.
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July 30, 2024

We’re delighted to announce that our in-licensed patent entitled LONG LIVED T CELLS FOR TREATING HIV INFECTION received a notice to grant by the Chinese Patent Office on July 22, 2024. The granted claims cover methods of making our stem-like RORA T-cells and modifying them to remove HIV co-receptors that provide a gateway for infection. Granted claims also cover modified stem-like RORA T-cells made by these methods.

Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) is the owner of proprietary technology for creating stem-like RORA T cells that have potential to resist HIV infection and restore patient T-cell lineages compromised by the virus. RORA Biologics, Inc is the exclusive worldwide licensee.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), HIV remains a significant global health concern with well over 1,000,000  people in China living with HIV who know their status.
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July 22, 2024

More clues to a possible cure for AIDS emerged at the 25th International AIDS Conference in Munich, 2024

A seventh known patient has been reported to arrive at a state of apparent remission from HIV infection after receiving a bone-marrow transplant to treat leukemia. What is special about this patient, known as the “Second Berlin Patient”, is that he received a transplant where only half of the cells should have been resistant to HIV infection by virtue of a missing HIV docking site (CCR5 protein). Somehow, immune cells from the transplant were able to reduce viral reservoirs in the patient despite having cells HIV could potentially infect. It may be that removing the HIV docking site on transplant cells was not required in this patient, but it did make the job of clearing the virus easier for the immune system.
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March 23, 2024

Nelson Vergel, an HIV long-term survivor and friend of RORA Bio recently chronicled his journey as person living as an HIV-immune non-responder (“HIV-INR”). See the link below. People living as HIV-INRs face persistent immunological challenges in which their CD4 T-cell levels remain below 300 cells/mL (a better range is 500-1500). The low T-cell level makes them more susceptible to infection and certain cancers for life.

RORA Bio is developing a first-in-class T-cell platform that may help support T-cell levels in HIV-INR patients should future clinical trials be successful. The platform consists of a newly discovered, long-lived, stem-like memory cell population that we call “RORA cells”.
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March 5, 2024

The WHO said that resistance to GSK's HIV drug dolutegravir has exceeded levels observed during its clinical trials, citing observational and survey data received from a few countries, Reuters writes. Resistance ranged from 3.9% to 8.6% and reached 19.6% among people who have received and transitioned to an antiretroviral therapy containing dolutegravir for combating high HIV viral loads.
New therapies to combat HIV infection are clearly needed. RORA Bio is developing a first in class T-cell platform engineered to resist HIV infection and reconstitute the T-cell arm of the immune system.
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October 10, 2023

NIH will host a meeting entitled Strategies For An HIV Cure 2023 from October 12-13, 2023. The meeting will feature presentations from ten NIH Martin Delaney Collaboratories for HIV Cure Research. The event will also include presentations from the two Centers for Innovative HIV/AIDS Vaccine and Cure Research (CIAVCR). It will also feature abstract-driven poster sessions. Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Rafick Sekaly, and our VP Clinical Opps, Dr. Ashish Sharma, will be attending and presenting at the meeting.
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October 4, 2023

We’re happy to announce that our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Rafick Sekaly, and VP Clinical Operations lead, Dr. Ashish Sharma, attended the recent HIV Cure Symposium in Ghent, Belgium. Dr. Sekaly gave a presentation entitled “Multi-omics dissection of mechanisms of HIV persistence and immune dysfunction” while Dr. Sharma spoke about “Single Infusion of STEM like CCR5-modified CD4 T cells provide long-term HIV control”

RORA Biologics is advancing a recently discovered, long-lived, and stem-like memory cell population (“RORA cells”) as a potential first-in-class treatment modality for certain cancers and infectious diseases.
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June 18, 2023

Some people living with HIV do well on antiretroviral therapy (ART) but they cannot make enough T-cells to attain immunocompetent levels. These people, called immunological non-responders (INRs) by the medical community, face substantial health challenges for life. We are using our RORA-Tscm platform to create a new cell therapy aimed at helping these people reconstitute their T-cells. We were very happy to see our efforts mentioned in a recent webinar by NMAC: a non-profit organization working with HIV community groups across the United States.
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February 27, 2023

CAR-T cell therapies continue to produce profound clinical responses in many patients with blood cancer. Unfortunately, solid tumors are mostly resistant. In this month’s Science Translational Medicine, researchers show how stem-like T-cells can be armed to attack solid tumors in pre-clinical models. These results may pave the way for more effective CAR-T therapies against solid tumors.
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February 23, 2023

Case Western Reserve University completes exclusive license agreement with Atlanta-based RORA Biologics Inc. for cancer and HIV therapy technologies

Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) has completed an exclusive license agreement with Atlanta-based RORA Biologics Inc. (RORA-Bio) for intellectual property to develop new therapies to treat HIV and certain kinds of cancer.

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The agreement gives RORA-Bio exclusive international rights to T-cell memory stem-cell (RORA cells) technologies developed by Rafick Sekaly, formerly a professor at the CWRU School of Medicine, and co-director of the Center for AIDS Research Proteomics and Systems Biology Core.
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February 22, 2023

Rafick Sékaly (CSO), Ashish Sharma (VP, Clin Opps) and colleagues are presenting a late breaking abstract entitled “Single Infusion of Stem-like CCR5-modified CD4+ T-cells Provide Long-Term HIV Control” at the 2023 Conference on Retroviruses & Opportunistic Infections (CROI, Feb 16-22, Seattle).  

In related work, they and colleagues reported that expansion of a newly identified subset of CD4+ T stem cell memory cells (“RORA cells”) persisted in patients long-term and correlated with improvement in control of HIV replication (Zeidan, J et al; bioRxIv 2021.02.28.433290).   

RORA Biologics is developing RORA cells as a platform from which to make novel “living” drugs that may eventually be used to treat certain cancers and help people living with HIV.
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