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Huge congratulations to Professor Ravi Gupta who has been listed in Time magazine’s ‘100 most influential people of 2020’.

Included along household names such as Killing Eve writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge,  Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, President Donald Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel,  Professor Gupta’s accolade recognises his involvement in using stem cell transplantation to cure the so-called ‘London Patient’, Adam Castillejo, of HIV infection. Castillejo is only the second person (following the ‘Berlin Patient’) to be cured of HIV.

Professor Gupta is currently supervising a major project (funded by the Rosetrees Trust and the Wellcome Trust) to improve understanding of how HIV escapes into the central nervous system (CNS) in patients receiving treatment who should otherwise be free from the long term consequences of the infection.

‘CNS escape’ could be responsible for a variety of clinical problems, such as impairment of memory and concentration in HIV positive case, treatment failures, and hospital admission and disability in a small number of cases.

Professor Gupta is also researching other areas of virology and developing Covid-19 diagnostics. Rosetrees is funding another project in his lab aiming to understand mechanisms causing immune hyperinflammation in Covid-19 patients.

Ravi Gupta is a Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases and a member of the faculty of the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, working on understanding genetic and biological properties of drug resistant HIV in the local population. More details can be found on his laboratory homepage here (https://www.citiid.cam.ac.uk/ravindra-gupta)