Hot Topics in HIV – Vaccines, immune recovery and eradication 2025

Dr. Clotet received his MD (1976) and his PhD (1981), with a thesis on autoimmune diseases, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). That same year, his internship as an Internal Medicine specialist at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona coincided with the first AIDS case reported in Spain. This case was the catalyst for a career dedicated to this serious disease, first as head of the HIV Unit of the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital in Badalona (1987-2015) and then as founder and president of the Fight against AIDS Foundation (1992), which is now named as Fight Infections Foundation.

Dr. Clotet soon saw the need to go a step beyond patient care to conduct research aimed at eradicating AIDS. In 1995, with the support of “la Caixa” and the Department of Health of the Generalitat of Catalonia, he founded the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, which he still heads.  In addition, Dr. Clotet is also the clinical director of Infectious Diseases at the Metropolitana Nord area of the Catalan Institute of Health, scientific advisor to two IrsiCaixa spin-offs: Aelix Therapeutics SL and AlbaJuna Therapeutics SL and director of the Chair of AIDS and Related Diseases at the Universitat de Vic (UVic).

He has published more than 1000 papers in high impact international journals and his contributions to research have been recognized with the Josep Trueta medal to Sanitary Merit and the ‘Premi Nacional de Recerca’, among other awards.

ICREA Research Professor and Principal Investigator at Retrovirology and Clinical Studies research group, Irsicaixa AIDS Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain.

Mayte Coiras holds a PhD in Pharmacy and is a Senior Researcher at the National Center of Microbiology (Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain) where she is the Head of the Immunopathology and Viral Reservoir Unit. Her main research focus is the study of the parameters influencing the stability of the HIV-1 reservoir, as well as the design of new therapeutic strategies aimed at achieving a functional cure. She has been the principal investigator in 18 research projects, has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles, and has presented more than 150 abstracts at national and international conferences.

Professor at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, where he leads the Laboratory for Translational Immunology of Viral Infections and co-leads the Personalized Infectious Medicine program at the Berlin Institute of Health. Previously, he served as an Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University in New York. As a physician-scientist, his work spans basic immunology of viral infections through the clinical development of antibody immunotherapies for infectious diseases, with a focus on HIV. His contributions have earned him significant recognition, including a 2021 Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement Award, the 2023 German AIDS Award from the German AIDS Society, and recognition as one of Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers for 2023 and 2024.

Txell Genescà is a Senior Researcher from the Infectious Diseases Department at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institut, in Barcelona, since 2017. She is a veterinarian by training, who after her PhD in organ preservation for trasplantation, spent 6 years at the University of California working on mucosal immunology and vaccine development using the macaque model for HIV. In her current position, she leads the “Mucosal Immunity against Infection” group, with projects based on tissue explant models focused on defining protective immune responses against pathogens, with a particular emphasis on T cells, in order to develop new therapies against infections.