Hot Topics in HIV – Vaccines, immune recovery and eradication 2026

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

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.

Gerard holds a degree in Biomedicine from the University of Barcelona and a Master’s in Molecular Biotechnology. After completing his academic training, he oriented his career toward the biotechnology industry, joining QIAGEN in the R&D department and later Werfen as an R&D scientist. His work in both companies focused on the development of in vitro diagnostic devices for the detection of infectious and autoimmune diseases.

He is currently pursuing a PhD at IrsiCaixa, where his research focuses on the development of CAR-T cell–based immunotherapies aimed at achieving an HIV cure. His work specifically explores strategies to eliminate latent viral reservoirs by targeting CD4+ T cells.”

Dr. Caskey is a Professor of Clinical Investigation at The Rockefeller University. Her work focuses on the development and clinical evaluation of novel immunotherapeutic strategies against infectious diseases, with a special emphasis on HIV.  Caskey has led a series of clinical studies to evaluate the safety and efficacy of broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies. These studies have revitalized this area of HIV research, which had been abandoned after first-generation antibodies failed to show significant effects in humans. Broadly neutralizing antibodies are now considered one of the most promising strategies to achieve HIV remission, as well as potential alternatives to antiretrovirals for both therapy and prevention. She served as Chair of the Reservoirs Remission and Cure Transformative Science Group of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) and co-leads one of the Martin Delaney Collaboratories for HIV Cure, called REACH. She is an Associate Director of the Einstein-Rockefeller-CUNY Center for AIDS Research. Dr. Caskey graduated from medical school at the Federal University of Sergipe in Brazil. She then completed an internal medicine residency at Saint Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, in New York, followed by fellowship training in infectious diseases at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center.  Dr. Caskey is also an attending physician in infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine Center and an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation

Dr. Elena Herrera-Carrillo is a biochemist by training and Group Leader at the Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine “López-Neyra” (IPBLN-CSIC) in Granada, Spain. Prior to joining IPBLN-CSIC, she spent 14 years at Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands, where she led a research group in gene therapy and served as an Associate Professor. In 2025, she relocated her laboratory to Spain, where she continues to advance her research with a primary focus on HIV cure strategies.

With almost 20 years of experience in HIV research, Dr. Herrera-Carrillo has extensive expertise in molecular virology and gene delivery technologies. Throughout her career, she has developed innovative antiviral and gene therapy approaches based on RNA interference (RNAi), peptide-based virus entry inhibitors, and CRISPR-Cas genome editing technologies. Her work has employed a range of delivery platforms, including lentiviral vectors (LV), adeno-associated viral vectors (AAV), and lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), with a particular emphasis on targeted delivery strategies. Her research aims to translate fundamental discoveries into novel therapeutic approaches for HIV and other infectious diseases, advancing the development of durable treatments and curative interventions.

José Moltó is clinical physician in the HIV Clinic of the Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol in Badalona, Spain. He obtained is MD from the University of Alicante in 1996, and completed his internal medicine training in the Hospital General Universitario de Elche (Alicante). Since his very early medicine studies, Dr. Moltó was interested in infectious diseases, particularly in HIV infection. He joined the HIV Clinic of the Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol in 2002, and he obtained his PhD degree from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2008. He is committed with HIV research with special interest in clinical pharmacology of antiretroviral treatment, including population pharmacokinetics and drug-drug interactions.

Matthieu Perreau is Full Professor at the Service of Immunology and Allergy, Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland. After receiving his PhD from Montpellier University (France), he subsequently joined the Service of Immunology and Allergy to focus on the evaluation of HIV-1 vaccine immunogenicity and on the delineation of HIV-1 immunopathogenesis. More recently, he focused on the identification of immunological and virological parameters contributing to HIV persistence.

Dr. Christopher Peterson develops cell and gene therapy strategies to address a range of health outcomes, from improving cancer treatment to curing HIV. Dr. Peterson’s work focuses on hematopoietic stem cells, or blood stem cells. In the bone marrow, blood stem cells give rise to numerous cell types including oxygen-carrying red blood cells, infection-fighting white blood cells and platelets. To find a cure for HIV, Dr. Peterson has focused on genetically engineering blood stem cells and their progeny to resist HIV infection and better fight the virus. His goal is to establish a sufficient number of these modified cells in the body to improve the effectiveness, longevity and safety of gene therapies for people living with HIV.

Sergio Serrano-Villar is an Infectious Diseases physician at University Hospital Ramón y Cajal in Madrid. He received his PhD in Medicine in 2011 at Complutense University of Madrid and has worked as a research fellow at University of San Francisco under the mentorship of Dr. Steven Deeks.

Dr. Serrano-Villar has been involved in HIV research for 15 years, with a special focus on the immunopathogenesis and clinical consequences of chronic inflammation during treated HIV infection, including the role of the microbiota in the sustainment of chronic immune dysfunction. He combines his clinical work at the HIV clinics of University Hospital Ramón y Cajal in Madrid with his research activity. He is the coordinating investigator of a European Horizon 2020 proposal, an international effort to exploit the microbiome as a screening tool in the screening of anal cancer, and has led the development of studies aimed at manipulating the microbiome in HIV-infected individuals, including clinical trials with nutritional interventions and fecal microbiota transplantation. He is also leading multicenter observational studies and a clinical trial to better understand the effects of different ART strategies on chronic inflammation. More recently, he has expanded his research lines to the COVID19 and cancer fields, in which he is aiming to gain understanding in the immunopathogenesis of severe COVID19 and to explore the manipulation of the microbiota as a strategy to enhance the efficacy of immunotherapy in patients with advanced lung cancer.