HIV Clinical Topics in Antiretroviral Therapy workshop 2023

Josep M Llibre, MD, PhD, received his MD in the Universitat de Barcelona, and obtained his specialty in Internal Medicine and his PhD in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is a member of the panel of Antiretroviral treatment guidelines at the GeSIDA group (AIDS group of the SEIMC Spanish society), and an expert advisor of the Catalan Health Institute (ICS) on antiretroviral treatment and hepatitis C (PADEICS). He started caring for patients with HIV/AIDS at the beginning of the epidemic in Spain in 1987. His main areas of interest in HIV Medicine include the clinical implications of HIV-1 resistance, the analysis of safety and efficacy in HIV-1 antiretroviral treatment clinical trials (both in naïve and pre-treated patients), with a special interest in drug efficacy and pharmacoeconomics, and hepatitis C co-infection. He has published widely in journals and book chapters, as well as HIV/AIDS medical webs, on clinical aspects of HIV-1 treatment and care, HIV-1 resistance, clinical reviews, positioning papers, treatment intensification and simplification strategies, and participated in many pivotal clinical trials. He has also published in basic science research journals. He collaborates as an editor and/or peer-reviewing with many top international medical journals. He is involved in HIV Medical Educational training in Spain and other European, as well as Asian Countries.

Chloe Orkin is Professor of HIV Medicine at Queen Mary University of London and Consultant Physician at Barts Health NHS Trust. She is the Clinical Lead for COVID-19 studies at Barts Health. Chloe is immediate past Chair of the British HIV Association, President-elect of the Medical Women’s Federation and a member of the governing council for IAS. Her specialist interest is anti-retroviral therapy.

Professor Orkin has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and has co-authored four British HIV Association guidelines on: Antiretroviral therapy, Hepatitis, Malignancy and Routine Monitoring.

University of Bonn, Germany

Dr. Gandhi is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Director of HIV Clinical Services and Education at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Dr. Gandhi is  site leader of the MGH AIDS Clinical Research Site in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). He is also the Co-Director and Principal Investigator of the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research (CFAR). Dr. Gandhi is a member of the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel. He is also a scientific member of the Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents, and Chair of the International Antiviral Society-USA Panel on Antiretroviral Drugs for Treatment and Prevention of HIV in Adults. Dr. Gandhi is Editor-in-Chief of NEJM Journal Watch Infectious Diseases. Dr. Gandhi graduated from Harvard Medical School, completed his medical residency and chief residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and his infectious diseases fellowship training at Johns Hopkins Hospital.  He has been on the faculty of the Infectious Diseases Division at MGH since 2000.

Ole Kirk has been an ID consultant since 2011 and works at Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark, sharing his time between an ID in-patient ward and a HIV out-patient ward. He is also an adjunct professor in infectious diseases at University of Southern Denmark.

Since 1997, Ole has been engaged in HIV medicine and European research activities, in particular in management of the EuroSIDA Study, but also in other large cohort collaborations such as the DAD Study and COHERE. Since 2006, he has coordinated the TB-HIV Studies including 62 sites in Latin America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

Ole has published approximately 200 articles, mainly within research areas such HIV epidemiology, uptake of and response to ART across Europe as well as toxicity to ART, often with a perspective of regional differences across Europe. Another research priority has been HIV and opportunistic infections. In recent years he has been focusing on special clinical issues for PLWH in Eastern Europe, and in particular tuberculosis.

Ole is present chair of the OI panel of EACS Guidelines Committee and has over the last 15 years been actively involved in teaching activities for HIV clinicians, with special focus on colleagues in Eastern Europe. This includes organizing local HIV seminars, participating in WHO mentoring programmes for Ukrainian clinicians and running monthly videoconferences for HIV clinicians in Georgia and Ukraine.

In Denmark, Ole has been organizing and leading post-graduate courses of HIV infection and HIV care for Danish ID clinicians since 2013, and he is present chair of the Danish Society of Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Nadine Lübke holds a PhD in biology and is a certified medical virologist and has already been working in clinical virological diagnostics for 16 years. Since 2015, she has been working at the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Düsseldorf and heads the area of genotyping and resistance testing of viruses with a focus on HIV and hepatitis. Dr Lübke’s scientific work focuses on the evolution of resistance mutations, particularly in HIV but also in hepatitis and herpes viruses, as well as SARS-CoV-2. In 2019, she was also awarded the “Science Prize for Clinical Virology 2019” by the German Association for Combating Viral Diseases (DVV) and the Society for Virology (GfV) for her work.

From 2008 he has been working at IrsiCaixa as a Clinical Cohorts Coordinator of the HIVACAT Programme (Project for the development of an HIV vaccine). He collaborate on the recruitment and follow-up of several cohorts (HIV acute infections, controllers, rapid progressors, HESN), and other studies (microbiota, pre-exposure prophylaxis). Another of his fields is Human Papillomavirus in HIV-infected. They have set up a program for the prevention of anal cancer in our Clinical Unit. He conducts a cohort study of HIV-uninfected men who have sex with men (MSM), in collaboration with a community-based organization (BCN Checkpoint). The objectives are to detect early infections and other STI among MSM, and to ensure a linkage to care. He collaborates with the therapeutic HIV vaccine study “Safety and Immunogenicity of ChAdV63.HIVconsv and MVA.HIVconsv Candidate HIV-1 Vaccines in Recently HIV-1 Infected Individuals With Early Viral Suppression After Initiation of Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART)”.

He also collaborates with the Microbial Genomics Group at the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute. This group has been the first one worldwide to demonstrate in two independent cohorts of HIV-1-infected subjects and HIV-1-negative controls in Europe that MSM often has a distinct composition of the human fecal microbiota, with increased microbial richness and diversity and enrichment in the Prevotella enterotype. Another field in which he is currently working is the Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP). Regarding this, he participates in a working group set up by the Health Department of Catalonia for the implementation of PrEP in our setting. Their group has developed an explant model which has been used to assess the potential of Maraviroc as a drug for PrEP using a single oral dose. Their results showed no ex-vivo protection, suggesting that ‘on demand’ preexposure prophylaxis with Maraviroc would not prevent rectal HIV-1 transmission. Apart from his research agenda, he works as an attending medical doctor at the HIV Unit of the Hospital, where he takes care of 3000 patients.

Chloe Orkin is Professor of HIV Medicine at Queen Mary University of London and Consultant Physician at Barts Health NHS Trust. She is the Clinical Lead for COVID-19 studies at Barts Health. Chloe is immediate past Chair of the British HIV Association, President-elect of the Medical Women’s Federation and a member of the governing council for IAS. Her specialist interest is anti-retroviral therapy.

Professor Orkin has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and has co-authored four British HIV Association guidelines on: Antiretroviral therapy, Hepatitis, Malignancy and Routine Monitoring.

Specialist in Dermatology and Venereology trained at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona.

She currently works as a senior specialist in the Dermatology Service of this centre, focusing on the area of sexually transmitted infections and neoplastic pathology related to HPV.

She has more than 9 years experience in screening for anal canal dysplasia in patients at high risk for anal cancer and she has published several research papers in national and international journals especially in the field of sexually transmitted infections.

She is also the head of the STI and HIV Research Group of the AEDV (Spanish Academy of Dermatology) since 2022.

Cristina Mussini has been Full Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy since 2011. She is also the Director of the Clinic of Infectious Diseases, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Policlinico, in Modena, Italy. She received her degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Modena in 1987 and completed a specialization in infectious diseases in 1990.

Cristina has published more than 200 papers in index journals with a total of above 900 and with an H-index of 55 (Google Scholar).

Cristina is a long-standing member of several organizations, including: the National AIDS Committee of the Italian Ministry of Health from 2009 to 2016; the Governing Board of the European AIDS Clinical Society since 2000; and the Scientific Committees for the European AIDS Conferences, HIV Glasgow and the Icona Cohort Study since 2008. She is Chair of the ESGIE, the ESCMID Study Group for Infections in the Elderly.

Nuria Espinosa has been practicing as a physician since 2008, the last 15 years in Seville, at the Clinical Unit of Infectious Diseases, Microbiology and Preventive Medicine of the Hospital Virgen del Rocio. Specializing in the care of patients with HIV, an activity she has practiced exclusively since 2012, Nuria Espinosa’s interests also include emerging pathogens and fever of unknown origin, the main topic of her PhD thesis in 2016. Nuria Espinosa is also a member of the Research group at the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBiS) and has participated as principal investigator, sub-investigator and collaborator in multiple projects in the field of HIV and antiretroviral treatment. Since 2018 she has served as chair of the HIV group of the Andalusian Society of Infectious Diseases. Since 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been active in the coordination and hospital care of patients with SARS CoV-2.

Adrià Curran is a staff physician of the Infectious Diseases Department and the coordinator of the Anal Dysplasia Screening Unit of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital. He has carried out specific training on HPV anal dysplasia in HIV patients at the University of San Francisco (CA, USA) with Prof. Joel Palefsky. He is a member of the International Anal Neoplasia Society. He participates as a researcher in multiple international clinical trials and has published more than 100 articles in national and international journals and book chapters on various aspects of HIV infection, HPV and its treatment.