Visionary Limited series It sees someone trying to change our way of life.
Ravindra Gupta has been studying drug-resistant HIV for over a decade when he first met Adam Castillejo, known as the “patient in London,” the second person in the world to be treated for AIDS. .. Was a professor at the University of London across the clinical and academic worlds when Castilejo showed both HIV positive and recurrent lymphoma after a previous transplant using healthy stem cells from Castillejo’s own body failed. did.
Dr. Gupta and his colleagues carry a rare gene, based on a study by German hematologist Gero Hütter and others treating Timothy Ray Brown, known as the “patient of Berlin,” the first person to have HIV. Proposed the use of stem cells from donors Mutant Castillo, who prevents certain individuals from becoming infected with HIV, agreed and was transplanted in 2016. Seventeen months later, Dr. Gupta and his team removed Castillo from antiretroviral drugs and kept HIV away. In 2019, three years after the transplant, Dr. Gupta published the results in Nature, confirming that Castillejo was infected with HIV.
The news rocked the scientific community and spurred the quest for a cure. Dr. Gupta was hired as a professor of clinical microbiology in Cambridge and set up the Gupta Lab on the school’s biomedicine campus to continue his research.
A few months later, a coronavirus pandemic occurred. He found himself drawn into the response as countries were blocked and the healthcare system reached its limits.
“The respiratory virus wasn’t something I would consider invading. I didn’t think I had any useful skills or expertise,” Dr. Gupta recently said. But he added: Things got worse here in March and everything shut down. One of the urgent needs was identified as a rapid test. “
Soon his team fully pivoted and published some of the first studies to validate rapid antibody testing for coronavirus using sharpened techniques during HIV research. Over the last two and a half years, Gupta Lab has begun cutting-edge research, explaining how new variants emerge, and enabling breakthrough Covid infections in vaccinated individuals. Provided some of the first evidence.
In his laboratory in Cambridge, he discussed both the remarkable progress made by scientists over the last three years and the consequences of the diminished public confidence in scientific knowledge.
This interview has been summarized and edited.
How did previous studies on AIDS / HIV affect your response to coronavirus?
The response to SARS-CoV-2 is accelerating primarily due to advances in HIV. The way we make medicines and target viruses has made great strides, and much of this technology is refining HIV.
What are the similarities between these two pandemics?
Both caused a greater panic of SARS-CoV-2 than HIV. This is a respiratory system, so there are good reasons. Certain people are more vulnerable than others, and socioeconomics is certainly important. Also, in this era of vaccine availability, the rich and the poor, the Global North and Global South are all occurring.
Has this global emergency improved your ability to collaborate with colleagues in different disciplines?
It certainly activated many interactions that would not have been possible otherwise. We were interested in immunology and did very cutting-edge work with colleagues downstairs and in different parts of the building. We made an artificial lung using stem cells and started the experiment. All of this began to happen as a result of an emergency. People we never talked about, ideas we would never have. So scientifically it’s really exciting.
Does Fatigue Explain the Declining Public Response to Covid?
Yes, I think so. I think that intensity caused the emotional burnout of energy. Of course, HIV has made progress for about 20 years. It happened very quickly for Covid. And without vaccines and mRNA technology, we would be in a much darker place.
Confidence in institutions is declining throughout society, but in your area it has a fairly serious impact, for example, on people who refuse vaccination. Did it influence your idea that scientists and medical institutions have to communicate with the general public?
I think there is generally a lack of trust between the public and informants. This is partly driven by the civilian sector, which disseminates false information. At first, I think the actual communication was pretty good. I am very glad that I received a clear message. The public health message is more complicated because no one wants to wear a mask.
For example, after vaccination, people thought we would be mask-free. Published a paper in Nature About breakthrough infections And the next week’s CDC cited it as a reason to mask our work, even with vaccines. This sounds normal now, but at the time it was crazy about people. But that was the right thing to do. After a few months, the reaction may be diminished and many people who have been vaccinated twice may end up with a second reinfection. As a result, it contributed to confusion due to lack of knowledge of education and nuances. And now, one of the things we have to deal with is that communication requires nuances that even scientists can’t understand. Therefore, it is almost impossible to expect the general public to understand this. So we are at the crossroads of how to convey a complex message.
If the majority of the population cannot be persuaded to be vaccinated, are there any long-term consequences?
In places like China, where the population is relatively naive when it comes to vaccines and vaccines are not always the best, the cycle can begin. And if people don’t receive boosters on time, it may reach a time when it becomes another major health problem of the scale we’ve already seen. We can foresee that it may be in trouble again in a few years. The worry is that we are organizing a lot of things we have developed to deal with this.
