Towards an HIV Cure Advisory Board

Charu Kaushic

Charu Kaushic, PhD, has been the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Infection and Immunity since 1 July 2018. She is also a tenured Full Professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. As Scientific Director, Charu is responsible for making decisions for CIHR’s strategic investments in the area of infection and immunity, nationally and internationally. She also represents CIHR and the Government of Canada at national and international forums related to infectious diseases.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was closely involved in shaping CIHR’s research response to the pandemic and served on a number of leadership tables. Charu has a PhD in immunology and did her postdoctoral training in mucosal immunology. As an active researcher, she manages an interdisciplinary research programme in women’s reproductive health, specifically basic, clinical and translational research examining susceptibility and immune responses to sexually transmitted viruses, HIV-1 and HSV-2.

Diana Finzi

Diana Finzi, PhD, MPH, led the NIH HIV research programme, advancing the Strategic Plan for HIV and prioritizing initiatives on women’s health, ageing, technology and researcher development. She emphasized basic science and strengthened partnerships with NIH institutes, PEPFAR and the White House.

As Director of the Basic Sciences Program at NIAID, she oversaw global HIV research and is renowned for her work on HIV latency, cure strategies and contributions to the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the US initiative. Diana holds a PhD in immunology from Johns Hopkins and an MPH from Yale.

Elliot Raizes

Elliot Raizes has been working to support the CDC’s global response to the HIV pandemic as a member of the HIV Care and Treatment Branch since 2007, including as the Adult Treatment Team Lead from 2016-2022 and branch chief since August 2022. He has been providing technical assistance to ministries of health, CDC staff and implementing partners in PEPFAR-supported countries for the past 16 years. He has also contributed to the development of global guidance on antiretroviral therapy and HIV drug resistance through his role on multiple WHO guideline groups and as a member of the WHO HIVResNet steering committee. Prior to joining the CDC, he spent 20 years as a consultant in infectious diseases, with emphasis on HIV management, in suburban Atlanta.

He graduated from Northwestern University Medical School and completed his postgraduate training in internal medicine at Emory University and infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina. Elliot presently serves as a member of the organizing committee for the International HIV Drug Resistance Workshop and was the Co-Chair of the IAS forum on the Risks of Pre-conception Dolutegravir Exposure in 2018-19.

He has served as co-lead of several initiatives at PEPFAR, including the HIV drug resistance workgroup, the Epidemic Control Teams and the PEPFAR COVID-19 response short-term task team. He is a co-investigator on multiple country-based HIV drug resistance surveillance projects and has been a co-author on over 20 publications related to HIV drug resistance and antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings. He is a recipient of the PEPFAR Lifetime Achievement Award.

Glaudina Loots

Glaudina Loots is the Director for Health Innovation at the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation in South Africa. She concentrates on enabling research and innovation that leads to the discovery and evaluation of new drug and treatment regimes, the development of new vaccines and new robust diagnostics, and the development of medical devices and digital health applications.

Glaudina serves on the advisory and steering committees of various international health initiatives: currently, she is one of the Vice-Chairs of the Board of the European Developing Country Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), as well as a member of the Board of the EU Global Health EDCTP Joint Undertaking. (EDCTP3). Glaudina is also a member of the Health Innovation For All Advisory Committee of the Institute for Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium.

Remko van Leeuwen

Remko van Leeuwen, with a PhD in clinical HIV studies, has more than 30 years of R&D experience under his belt, in both the industry and academic arenas. He has a medical background, has been trained as a clinical epidemiologist, and has extensive experience in clinical infectious disease management. He has been a team leader in several international drug and vaccine development programmes, in both the public and private sectors.

He carries in-depth knowledge of product development, especially of poverty-related diseases. He has experience in moving products toward the market, including in challenging market environments. As an entrepreneur, he founded the Netherlands-based biotech company, Madam Therapeutics, which brings a novel class of antibiotics to market.

Remko leads the secretariat of the European Global Health Research Institutes Network, which represents the leading global health research groups in Europe. Moreover, he serves as a board member of the BEAM Alliance, which represents biotech companies in Europe that work on the development of new antibiotics to overcome the societal challenge of antimicrobial resistance. He was the Program Director of the FP7-funded HOOKVAC project on vaccine development for hookworm disease (the world’s only consortium developing a vaccine for the neglected tropical disease, hookworm). Currently, he co-leads the EU/India-funded INDIGO programme; he also brings valorization and global health aspects (affordability and better accessibility) to the project.

Meg Doherty

Meg Doherty has been the Director of the Department of Global HIV, Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections Programmes at WHO since February 2020. Meg was previously the Coordinator of Treatment and Care in the Department of HIV at WHO Headquarters. She has more than 25 years of experience in HIV and infectious diseases, including leading WHO’s normative and programmatic work on expanding HIV treatment to all and reducing inequalities in access to the most effective antiretrovirals for people living with HIV. Meg spent 10 years in low- and middle-income countries, advising ministries of health and international partners on implementing comprehensive HIV and infectious disease programmes, including five years in Ethiopia as the Director of Clinical and Training Services for JHUTSEHAI, a PEPFAR implementing partner supported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Michaela Müller-Trutwin

Michaela Müller-Trutwin is a Professor at Institut Pasteur and head of the HIV, Inflammation and Viral Persistence Unit. She studied at the University in Bonn, Germany, and Frankfurt (with Rübsamen-Schaeff) and obtained her PhD from Paris-University (in the Barré-Sinoussi lab). She has worked at and collaborated with research institutes in countries in western and central Africa and in Asia (Senegal, Central African Republic, Gabon, Cameroon and Vietnam). For 10 years, she served as Chair of the Nonhuman Primate Models working group at ANRS. Since 2018, she has acted as the Chair of the coordinated action on HIV basic and translational research at the ANRS-MIE with a focus on HIV cure.

Michaela is a founding member of the French task force on HIV remission, RHIVIERA, and serves on multiple committees. She designed and directed the Pasteur-Paris University PhD programme. She has been invited to speak at major conferences, such as CROI, HIVR4P, CFAR and IAS science, and was co-organizer of multiple meetings, including the HIV cure ANRS-DZIF satellite at IAS 2024. Her team made key contributions on the origin of HIV, the role of inflammation in AIDS pathogenesis, the impact of early virus-host interactions on the outcome of HIV and the role of innate immunity in the regulation of viral persistence in tissues during HIV/SIV and SARS-CoV-2 infections. Her work has been honoured by awards, such as by the French Medical Research Foundation.

Joseph (Mike) McCune

Mike McCune is Head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Gates Foundation and a Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). After studies at Harvard College (with Jack Strominger) and the Rockefeller University (with Henry Kunkel and Gunter Blobel), he started treating people with HIV disease as a resident in internal medicine at UCSF from 1982 to 1984 and has been involved in the HIV and AIDS research field ever since. His work includes postdoctoral studies with Irv Weissman at Stanford (1985-1988), exploring the fusogenic properties of the HIV envelope protein and invention of the first humanized mouse model (the SCID-hu mouse) capable of multilineage human hematopoiesis and receptive to infection with primary isolates of HIV. This work was continued in companies that he co-founded (SyStemix in 1988 and Progenesys in 1991) and where he served first as CEO and then as a Scientific Director.

In 1995, Mike returned to academia as an investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and, from 2006, as the Chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine, which he founded, at UCSF. Concomitantly, he was the founding PI (and Senior Associate Dean) of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute at UCSF (from 2005-08).

In recent years, he has helped form multidisciplinary, collaborative research teams to find a cure for HIV disease, first in the context of NIH- and amfAR-funded “collaboratories” at UCSF (2010-2016) and then as Head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Gates Foundation (2018-present). Throughout this time, he has taken care of people with HIV disease at the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS Clinic/Ward 86 and has also actively mentored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in academia or biotech/pharma.

Mitchell Warren

Mitchell Warren has spent nearly 30 years devoted to expanding access to HIV prevention. He says he has had the great fortune to work with a wide range of activists and advocates, researchers and scientists, product developers and deliverers, policy makers, community advisory boards and the media from across the globe. This has often been as a translator, helping these often-diverse groups with diverse points of view understand each other better.

In 1993, Mitchell established a condom social marketing project in South Africa, working with PSI and local partners to create the Society for Family Health. This was the first programme to introduce the female condom, as part of the new government’s National Barrier Method Strategy in 1994. In 1999, he joined the Female Health Company (FHC), manufacturer of the female condom; he established robust public-private partnerships to design and implement reproductive health programmes to leverage the introduction of the first female-initiated prevention method.

In 2003, after a decade focused on delivering prevention options that already existed, he expanded his work to include research and development of next-generation prevention. He joined the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) to direct vaccine preparedness and focus on increasing community understanding and national involvement in AIDS vaccine R&D.

Since 2004, Mitchell has been the Executive Director of AVAC, an international non-governmental organization that works to accelerate the ethical development and global delivery of HIV prevention options as part of a comprehensive and integrated pathway to global health equity. Through communications, education, policy analysis, advocacy and a network of global collaborations, it mobilizes and supports efforts to deliver proven HIV prevention tools for immediate impact, demonstrates and rolls out new HIV prevention options, and develops long-term solutions needed to end the epidemic.

He serves and/or has served on numerous boards and advisory committees. He is currently the Co-Chair of the Global HIV Prevention Coalition, a member of the PEPFAR Scientific Advisory Board, and President of the TB Alliance Stakeholder Association.

He has also worked closely with the IAS in numerous ways. He served as President of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise and led the transition of the Enterprise into a programme of the IAS in 2018. He helped create the HIVR4P, HIV Research for Prevention Conference, within the Enterprise in 2014, and was Co-Chair of HIVR4P 2020/1 after it was integrated into the IAS conference programme. He served as Track D Co-Chair and a member of the Scientific Programme Committee for the International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2016. He also serves on the IAS Towards an HIV Cure Advisory Board, which has a strong partnership with AVAC on cure research literacy, resource tracking and advocacy.

Mitchell has attended every IAS conference since 1996. He has collaborated with the IAS over two decades and has worked with the wider community of stakeholders for over a quarter century. He believes he brings an important and unique perspective to the IAS Governing Council. He welcomes the opportunity to bring his voice, experience, expertise and perspective to the IAS, its programmes and partnerships, and help fulfil its mission to lead collective action on every front, and with all stakeholders, in the global HIV response.

Moses Supercharger Nsubuga

Moses Supercharger is an artist, radio DJ and person openly living with HIV since 1994. He represents the African community on the INSIGHT/STRIVE community advisory board, ACTG. Currently, Moses chairs the committee constructing the first Global HIV ARTseum in Uganda. He is the co-founder of Joint Adherent Brothers and Sisters Against AIDS, known as JABASA, a community-based organization in Uganda promoting literacy of HIV prevention, treatment and cure research.  His hobbies are listening to heavy music, travelling, making lively HIV presentations and food.

Richard Jefferys

In his current role as the Treatment Action Group’s (TAG’s) Basic Science, Vaccines and Cure Project Director, Richard Jefferys is particularly focused on HIV cure research education and advocacy. Among the project’s most widely used and cited resources is the regularly updated listing of HIV cure-related clinical trials and studies on the TAG website, which Richard created in 2014 as a spin off from its annual Pipeline Reports. Richard represents TAG on the IAS Towards an HIV Cure Advisory Board, the amfAR Cure Council and the DARE Collaboratory Community Advisory Board. Richard began working in the HIV field in 1994 at the AIDS Treatment Data Network in New York City. He helped establish the Health GAP Coalition in 1999 and has written for a wide range of publications. He originally moved from London to New York in the early '90s to go dancing and make house music, and still harbours an affection for the analogue drum machines and synthesizers of the 1980s.

Sharon Lewin

Sharon Lewin is an infectious diseases physician and basic scientist and has worked in HIV-related clinical medicine and research for over 25 years. She is Director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture of the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. The Doherty Institute has over 850 staff working on infection and immunity through research, education and public health, and has a significant focus on virology, including HIV. She is an active clinician, working at the Alfred Hospital and Royal Melbourne Hospital, and a Melbourne Laureate Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne.   

Sharon is internationally recognized for her expertise in HIV cure, HIV-hepatitis B virus (HBV) co-infection and SARS-CoV-2 infection. She leads a large group focused on basic and translational science and early-phase clinical trials for cure interventions and is actively developing antiviral strategies for novel RNA viruses using RNA editing. She collaborates widely, including a long-standing partnership with researchers in Thailand on living with both HIV and HBV, and is a co-PI on DARE, a large NIH-funded network of researchers working on HIV cure. She has published over 350 manuscripts, predominately related to HIV cure and understanding HIV disease and related conditions, including HBV, cryptococcal infection and cytomegalovirus. She is also active in COVID-19 research. The Doherty Institute was the first to isolate SARS-CoV-2 and share the virus globally. 

She has been an IAS Member since 2007, when she was Deputy Chair of IAS 2007 in Sydney. As Local Co-Chair for AIDS 2014 in Melbourne, she leveraged significant in-kind and financial support from the Australian and Victorian Governments and the city of Melbourne. With her Australian colleagues, she led several advocacy programmes in relation to AIDS 2014, which resulted in every Australian state health minister signing a declaration to see the end of new HIV acquisitions in Australia by 2020. She is the key opinion leader for Melbourne as a UNAIDS Fast-Track City. She chairs the Advisory Board for the IAS Towards an HIV Cure initiative, and with Steve Deeks, co-chairs the annual IAS workshop on HIV cure and the HIV cure research academies.   

Her work has been recognized with the following major awards:   

• Melburnian of the Year (2014), awarded to a role model who has made an outstanding contribution to the city in their field, as well as a significant contribution to the community 

• Peter Wills Medal (2015), awarded by Research Australia to an Australian who has made an outstanding contribution to building Australia’s reputation in health and medical research, and fostering collaboration for better health 

• Officer of the Order of Australia (2019) for distinguished service of a high degree to Australia in the field of infectious diseases and HIV and AIDS 

• Committee for Melbourne Achiever Award (2020) for making a major contribution to the city of Melbourne, which will transform its future 

• The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) (2020) of Australia Outstanding Contribution Award 

She was a member of the council of the NHMRC, the peak funding body for medical research in Australia, and chaired its Health Translation Advisory Committee (2016-2021). She is a member of the Governing Board of the International Coalition for the Elimination of Hepatitis B virus (ICE-HBV) and the executive of the Global Virology Network. She was previously President of the Australian Society for HIV Medicine. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Vaccine Research Centre at the NIH and President of the Scientific Advisory Board of the newly formed ANRS/MIE (Maladies Infectiouses Emergentes) in France. 

Steve Deeks

Steven G Deeks, MD, is a Professor of Medicine in Residence at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is an expert on HIV treatment and cure. Steve has published over 700 peer-reviewed articles, editorials and invited reviews on these and related topics. He is one of the principal investigators of DARE (the Delaney AIDS Research Enterprise), which is an NIH-funded international programme aimed at developing therapeutic interventions to cure HIV.

He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, and serves on the scientific advisory board for Science Translational Medicine. In 2022, he received the UCSF Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award. In addition to his clinical and translational investigation, Steve maintains a primary care clinic for adults living with HIV.

Thumbi Ndung'u

Thumbi Ndung’u is interested in understanding antiviral immune mechanisms and viral adaptation in HIV-1 subtype C infection as a pathway to vaccine development. His work has focused on understudied populations and viral strains in resource-limited, high-burden settings where knowledge of the role of antiviral immune responses, viral strains and associated genetic factors is likely to yield the greatest impact in terms of biomedical interventions like vaccines. Thumbi’s early work addressed the lack of biological tools for HIV vaccine and pathogenesis research on HIV-1 subtype C, the predominant subtype globally and in southern Africa. He generated and characterized the first infectious molecular of HIV-1 subtype C from primary isolates, and constructed the first infectious subtype C envelope-derived simian-human immunodeficiency virus able to replicate in rhesus macaque peripheral blood mononuclear cells. These tools were deposited in the NIH AIDS reagent programme and remain available to researchers. The tools have facilitated in vitro and animal model studies of HIV-1 subtype C biology and vaccine development research.

Thumbi also actively participates in the training of graduate and postdoctoral researchers and has a special interest in capacity building for biomedical research in Africa. He is Director for basic and translational science at AHRI and a member of the AHRI faculty. He is an investigator and Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology Research group leader. He is also a University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Professor and Victor Daitz Chair in HIV/TB Research, Adjunct Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Scientific Director at UKZN’s HIV Pathogenesis Programme, the Programme Director for the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE) and the South African Research Chair in systems biology of HIV and AIDS.

Thumbi serves as Co-Chair of the IAS Towards an HIV Cure Advisory Board with Sharon Lewin.

Yiming Shao

Yiming Shao is an infectious diseases researcher serving as director of the AIDS Reference Laboratory, Virology Immunology Division and Chief Expert on AIDS at the Chinese Academy for Preventive Medicine, National Center for STD/AIDS Prevention and Control, Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) respectively. His research has focused on molecular epidemiology, immunology, cure and vaccine of HIV, SARS, COVID-19 and infectious disease control strategy. He has published over 900 scientific papers and received two national awards and numerous ministerial awards for science and technology in China.

He has served as Chair of the Chinese Virology Committee and Vice Chair of the Chinese Microbiology Association. He has also served on several WHO Advisory Committees, including AIDS strategic and technical, HIV vaccine, HIV drug resistance, and product development for vaccines. He served on the Advisory Committee of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative at the Gates Foundation. He is currently a leading scientist at Changping Laboratory, a research fellow at the China CDC, and a professor at Zhejiang University and Guangxi Medical University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.