Hot Topics in HIV – Vaccines, immune recovery and eradication 2024

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.

Dr Nicolas Chomont is an Associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Université de Montréal – CHUM Research Center. He obtained his PhD in medical virology at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris where he studied the interactions between HIV and the genital mucosa. From 2004 to 2009, he joined the Université de Montréal for his post-doctoral training. During this time, he described subsets of memory CD4 T cells that contribute to the persistence of HIV in individuals receiving antiretroviral therapy. He pursued his research as a principal investigator at the Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute of Florida to characterize these reservoirs. Since 2015, at the Université de Montréal, Dr Chomont is overseeing studies to unravel the molecular mechanisms involved in HIV latency and to develop novel therapeutic strategies aimed at eradicating HIV. His work focuses on the immunological mechanisms that are involved in the persistence of HIV infected cells, and particularly on the role of T cell proliferation in that process.

Lucy Dorrell received her medical degree and doctorate from the University of Southampton. She has been active as a physician-scientist in the field of HIV research for the past 25 years, latterly as a Professor of Immunology at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford. She joined Immunocore, a commercial stage T cell receptor biotechnology company, in 2017. In her role as Senior Director in Infectious Diseases Research and Clinical Development at Immunocore, she is leading the development of new T cell receptor-based bispecific drug candidates for a functional cure of chronic hepatitis B and HIV, in partnership with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Born in Lleida in 1977, Beatriz Mothe, MD, PhD, completed under a national competitive post-specialization programme for physicians (ISCIII Rio Hortega CM08/00020 2009-2011) was on the subject of immunological, virological and genetic HIV-control mechanisms that could be incorporated into the rational design of novel therapeutic vaccine candidates (Catalan Award for Best Thesis on Infectious Diseases in 2012). She has actively participated in pre-clinical testing of a novel HIV T-cell immunogen called HTI, designed to redirect cytotoxic T-cell responses to protective and conserved HIV targets capable of controlling viral replication. Following US research stays at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard (formerly Partners AIDS Research Center) and the National Cancer Institute at Frederick, after taking up a research fellowship position (ISCIII Joan Rodés JR13/00024 2014-2016), she is currently an associated researcher at the Host Genetics and Cellular Immunology group led by Dr. Brander in IrsiCaixa. She also works in the HIV unit of the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital, where she co-directs with Dr José Moltó the research line of Vaccines, Immunotherapies and Pharmacology. As a clinical researcher, she focuses on identifying and monitoring acute/recent HIV infection and HIV controllers as models for a functional cure (principal investigator for the early-cART and controller cohorts). She also coordinates clinical trials and immune monitoring in aspects related to therapeutic vaccines and eradication strategies. Mothe has been a teacher of the MSc in Zoonoses and One Health (UAB) since 2016 and is currently co-directing with Dr Brander a doctoral thesis on the subject of advanced immunology for the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She has been an associate professor in the Faculty of AIDS and Related Diseases at the University of Vic-University of Central Catalonia (UVic-UCC) since 2014.

Clinical Director, HIV cure studies at The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, University of Melbourne. As an MD with a dual clinical and scientific perspective, he has been actively engaged in clinical and translational studies in HIV cure research. He completed his PhD in HIV in 2014, which was focused on the clinical use of histone deacetylase inhibitors to reverse HIV latency as an approach to eliminating latently infected cells. His ongoing research continues to be focused on understanding and targeting HIV persistence on ART as a strategy towards a cure. He is currently holding a position as Ass.

Lishomwa (Lish) Ndhlovu, M.D., Ph.D. is a Tenured Professor of Immunology in Medicine and Neuroscience in the Division of Infectious Diseases and at the Brain and Mind Research Institute. At Weill Cornell Medicine since 2019, the thrust of his research program is confronting the challenges of HIV and aging and developing specific strategies to prevent, slow or eliminate complications associated with HIV. Using state of the art immunological, virological and molecular epigenetic modalities, his research exploits this knowledge in developing novel disease predictor biomarker models and inform effective interventions through pre-clinical and clinical investigations across the ages, while also creating a precision level view for interventions towards HIV cure. Towards these efforts he is a co- Principal Investigator of the NIH-wide supported UM1 Martin Delaney Collaboratory HIV Cure consortium, ‘HOPE’, testing novel retroviral silencing and gene editing approaches toward a cure and two NIH-NIDA funded U01 ‘Weill Cornell-SCORCH’ consortium grants, documenting single cell substance use disorder responses in the brain in the setting of HIV. As a member of the International Neuro-HIV Cure Consortium, he is also creating a precision level view for interventions towards HIV clearance in the brain. With NIH R01 funding he is also evaluating engineered immunotherapies towards multitargeted HIV cure strategies. He serves as member of the UW/Fred Hutch CFAR External Advisory Committee, the NIH Office of AIDS Research Advisory Committee (OARAC, 2024-2027) and as Co-Editor in Chief of the journal ‘AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses’. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2021 and serve as Chair of the American foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) Scientific Advisory Committee (2021-2025) and the California HIV Research Program. He is deeply committed and active in teaching and mentoring students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty including under-represented minorities with many achieving independent faculty positions.