Scientific Advisory Board
CanCURE is guided by a Scientific Advisory Board comprising five world-renowned basic and clinical scientists with a proven track record in the field of HIV Cure research.
Eric J. Arts, PhD
Professor and Chair, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Schulich School of Mecidine & Dentistry, Western University, London, On, Canada
Director, Ugandan CFAR Laboratories
Dr. Eric J. Arts is Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Western University in London, Canada. Previously he held a position as Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He received an honors BSc degree (1990) from University of Western Ontario followed by a PhD (1994) from McGill University, Montréal, Canada. With support from Health Canada PhD and PDF fellowships, he published more than 25 research papers with his PhD advisor, Dr. Mark Wainberg at the McGill AIDS Center and with his PDF advisor, Dr. Stuart F.J. LeGrice at CWRU. His research for the past 16 years has focused on HIV-1 fitness, evolution, and virulence in regards to transmission, disease progression, immune escape, drug resistance, and global HIV spread. Since 1998, he has directed the CFAR Laboratories at the Joint Clinical Research Centre, Kampala, Uganda and has collaborated with investigators in Zimbabwe, China, Cameroon, Canada, Belgium, UK, France, Brazil, and Argentina. This research has been supported by grants from the NIH (NIAID, NICHD, and NHLBI), from the State of Ohio, Merck, and amfAR. He has served as Chair and member of the NIH AIDS Drug Discovery and Therapeutics grant panel and has reviewed grants for the many governments around the world.
Dr. Michael M. Lederman received his BSc degree in Biology from Brandeis University and his MD from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. He trained in Internal Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals of Cleveland and the VA Medical Center where he served as chief resident in Medicine and completed fellowship training in Infectious Diseases. He received post-doctoral training in cellular immunology in the laboratory of Dr. Jerrold Ellner and he joined the faculty at Case in 1980. Dr. Lederman has been engaged in HIV/AIDS research since he and Dr. Oscar Ratnoff first described and characterized the occurrence of AIDS-related immune deficiency in otherwise healthy men with hemophilia in 1983. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications largely focused on the mechanisms whereby HIV infection induces immune deficiency and on strategies to correct and prevent it. In 1985, Dr. Lederman established the Special Immunology Unit at University Hospitals of Cleveland that was the first dedicated HIV clinic in Northern Ohio. In 1987, he established the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit at Case/University Hospitals and within the national network of these units, the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), he established and directs the network of Immunology Support Laboratories that provides immunologic monitoring of national HIV treatment trials. In the more recent reorganization of the ACTG, he was elected chairman of the Inflammation and End Organ Disease Transformative Science Group that is charged with targeting the morbid complications of HIV infection that are linked to immune activation and inflammation. Dr. Lederman is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the American Association of Immunologists, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the HIV Medicine Association and is a Fellow of the American Association of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on the editorial boards of several research journals, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards for the Forum for Collaborative Research and the Agence Nationale de Recherche sur le SIDA (ANRS).
Guido Poli, MD
AIDS Immunopathogenesis Unit
Division of Immunology, Transplantation and Infectious Diseases,Vita-Salute San Raffaele University School of Medicine & San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy
Born in 1957; M.D. degree in 1982, Specialist in Oncology in 1985 at the School of Medicine, University of Ferrara, Italy. He begun his research on HIV/AIDS in 1984 in the Laboratory of Human Immunology directed by Alberto Mantovani at the “Mario Negri” Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milano, Italy, providing among the first descriptions of perturbation of innate immunity in HIV infection. In 1986 he joined the Laboratory of Immunoregulation at the NIAID, NIH, directed by Anthony S. Fauci, where he focused on the role of interferons and cytokines as regulators of HIV latency and replication. For his contributions, he received the NIH Award of Merit in 1992. In 1994 he returned to Milano, Italy as Head of the AIDS Immunopathogenesis Unit at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milano and received the ESCI (European Society for Clinical Investigation) Award in 1999. In 2002 he became Associate Professor of Pathology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milano. In 2014, he has been appointed Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD. In 2015 he has been promoted to Full Professor of Pathology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milano. Since 2008 he coordinates the Basic and Applied Immunology Section the PhD in Molecular Medicine (http://www.unisr.it/phd/eng). Among other grants, he has participated to several EC-FP6 funded grants (FP6 AVIP, NEAT, Europrise) and acted as coordinator of the “GISHEAL” program on the genetics and immunology of HIV+ long term nonprogressors (LTNP) – and he is participant to the FP7 project “AIM-HIV”. He is, or has been, Associate Editor of different scientific journals including The Journal of Immunology and AIDS. He is currently author of 161 original articles and 94 reviews, editorials or book chapters scientific publications for a total impact factor >1,200 and an h-index of 52 (source: ISI) -
Dr. Guido Silvestri received his MD in Ancona, Italy, and completed Residency training in Internal Medicine & Clinical Immunology (Florence 1990) and Pathology (U. Penn 2001). Since 1993, Dr. Silvestri has been involved in studies of AIDS pathogenesis, prevention, and therapy, mostly using non-human primate models of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and simian/human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV) infection, with particular focus on comparative studies of pathogenic and non-pathogenic primate lentiviral infections. Dr. Silvestri is currently the Principal Investigator of several NIH grants, including an R37 MERIT award, and he is involved in both the Consortium for AIDS vaccine studies in non-human primates and the CHAVI-ID. He has authored or co-authored 178 peer-reviewed publications in this field, including some in the highest impact journals (Cell, Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, etc). His work has been quoted over 10,000 times, and has been presented in plenary sessions at all the major HIV/AIDS Conferences (CROI, IAS, Keystone, etc). Dr. Silvestri is an Editor of the Journal of Virology, an Associate Editor of PLoS Pathogens, and a past-Editor of the Journal of Immunology. He also serves in the Editorial Board of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Clinical Microbiology Reviews. He served as Chairman or Standing Member in several study sections at the NIH, CIHR, ANRS, amfAR, and the European Commission. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), of the International AIDS Society (IAS) Scientific Working Group on HIV Cure, and was a Co-Chair of the 6th International AIDS Conference in Rome, July 2011.