Department of Medicine Grand Rounds

TOPIC: "Why does HIV persist in patients on effective antiviral therapy?"
SPEAKER: Una O’Doherty, MD, an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Transfusion Medicine

Dr. O'Doherty began studying HIV in the early 90s while a student in Ralph Steinman’s lab.  She has since developed a spinoculation model for HIV latency that is now widely used and has developed robust qPCR-based methods for measuring HIV integration.  Her work suggests that the HIV reservoir is not as invisible as is thought - a small subset is expressed at any moment in time, which has important implications for HIV-cure research.  She recently proposed a new assay, adapted from a method for rare cancer cell detection, called Fiber-optic Array Scanning Technology (FAST) to identify rare HIV-expressing cells, and preliminary data (submitted for publication) suggests that FAST may provide a high throughput surrogate for measuring replication competent virus, and thus may be used for evaluating HIV eradication studies.

Watch It Live!

Department of Medicine Grand Rounds

The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Tucson is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians.  The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Tucson designates this live activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s) ™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

All Faculty, CME Planning Committee Members, and CME Office Reviewers have disclosed that they have no financial relationships with commercial interests that would constitute a conflict of interest concerning this CME activity.

Learning Objectives:

1. Diagnose a variety of internal medicine illnesses
2. Understand more clearly advances in therapy
3. Become truly professional physicians

Claudia R. Duran, crduran@deptofmed.arizona.edu