Overview
- Charité formally opened the Berlin Center for HIV Cure, known as BeCURE, on Wednesday to bring together basic science, clinical trials and social research aimed at curing or durably controlling HIV.
- The centre will be based in the Si‑M building on the Virchow campus and run joint programs with Technische Universität Berlin to speed lab-to-clinic testing of new therapies.
- BeCURE will prioritize scalable, lower-risk approaches — including antibody and immune therapies plus gene and cell techniques — while treating stem-cell transplants as a proven but too-risky option for most people.
- Clinical work will lean on recent trial signals that some immunotherapies or antibody regimens achieve ART-free remission in roughly 10–20% of participants and will embed people with HIV in study design to ensure acceptability.
- The effort responds to a large public-health need: about 41 million people live with HIV worldwide and roughly 18,000 people in Berlin are estimated to have the virus, so researchers want therapies that can be widely used beyond rare transplant cures.