HIV cure: what lies beneath? | Dr Virginie Gautier | TEDxUCD

HIV infects T-cells, ‘high-jacking’ their cellular machinery and turning them into virus-producing ‘factories’. A small proportion of these cells can create a persisting pool of latently infected cells, which constitute the HIV latent reservoir. There, the virus remains dormant, silent and hidden from patients’ immune defences and from otherwise effective anti-retroviral treatments. In her TEDxUCD 2015 talk Virginie provides an insight into the global research towards eradicating the latent HIV reservoirs, by forcing the virus to ‘wake-up’ and then target and eliminate the viral reservoirs. Dr Virginie Gautier is a Principal Investigator at the UCD Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases in the UCD School of Medicine. Dr Virginie Gautier is a Principal Investigator at the UCD Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases (CRID) in the UCD School of Medicine. Her research programmes focus on the HIV-Host interface and HIV-CURE research. The core expertise of Dr Gautier’s research group lies in molecular and cellular virology, epigenetics, functional genomics and dynamic microscopy. These exploratory approaches have led to the identification of key druggable targets, which are currently under investigation as part of her HIV-CURE Programme which is funded by the Health Research Board, the Irish Research Council and Horizon 2020. Dr Gautier is currently the European co-ordinator of the Horizon 2020 research programme entitled Accelerating HIV CURE research in Europe. She graduated with a BSc (Biochemistry) from the University of Tours (France) and a PhD in Medical Microbiology from University College Dublin. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx