Linos Vandekerckhove - The Location of the HIV Viral Reservoir

Over the last 10 years, people have been looking for HIV’s hiding place. Mainly what they did was they tried to find the virus in a certain organ and in a certain cell, and quantify that. But, as the virus evolves before you start the antiretroviral therapy, the organs in the body are infected with a slightly different virus, so a new approach had to be looked at, in order to find the viral reservoir.

In this episode, Professor Vandekerckhove shares his laboratory’s latest discovery – the location of the viral reservoir – and breaks it down for us to understand the impact this has on finding a cure for HIV and ending the epidemic.

Prof. Dr. Linos Vandekerckhove is the principal investigator at the HIV Cure Research Center in Ghent, Belgium, which he founded in 2009. He graduated from the Medical School KULeuven in 1998 and obtained his Ph. D. in 2006 from the Rega Institute, also in Leuven. In 2001 he worked for a year at the Pretoria Academic Hospital in South Africa, in the service of Internal Medicine.

In 2009 he started his own laboratory and a year later he spent 5 months in San Francisco to familiarize himself with research on a cure. He combined his infectious disease specialist education program with a Ph. D in Professor Debyser’s laboratory for Molecular Virology. With this combination, he bridges the gap between Clinical Infectious Disease at the AIDS clinic and basic Molecular Virology research.

In 2010 he worked as an invited researcher at the Gladstone Institute in Eric Verdin and Warner lab. Since then, he has been working as an assistant professor in Internal Medicine at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Today, his laboratory is a team leader for HIV reservoir research.

Listen to Episode 12 of Positively Alive, to learn about the latest discovery in this field - the location of the viral reservoir of the HIV virus – and what that means for people living with HIV.

Questions I ask:

• Could you please elaborate a little bit on why the HIV Cure Research Center was established, and what exactly do you do at the research center? (03:59)
• How easy is it to find patients for your studies? (08:30)
• How do you manage the risk that is involved with doing those research programs? (09:17)
• You have also mentioned that if someone is on treatment and suddenly stops that treatment, the virus will have a rebound that is faster than compared to before. At what exact rate does it rebound, and does it also mean that the virus has become stronger? (13:51)
• How hopeful are you, really, that we are close to a cure for HIV? (18:52)
• What are the specific needs of the HIV Cure and Research Center? (21:26)
• What would you say to young researchers who start a career in this specific area? (25:30)

In this episode you will learn:

• The importance of international collaboration in actually finding a solution to the epidemic. (06:20)
• Where the HIV viral reservoir is located inside the body. (10:23)
• The impact on the HIV positive individuals that this new discovery has, in terms of medication and costs. (17:10)
• The significance of U=U within the context of the HIV Cure and Research Center studies. (22:59)
• Linos’s message for people living with HIV today. (26:42)

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