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Mr Daan Roovers

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Biography

Daan Roovers is a research assistant/PhD candidate at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) working with Professor Christine Goffinet. After a bachelor’s in chemistry, Daan studied Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences at Utrecht University. His previous research projects focussed on biophysics (membrane protein solubilisation by amphiphatic polymers) and molecular imaging (cryo-electron microscopy, single particle analysis, tomography). Daan’s PhD project focusses on studying HIV-1 infection in the context of the innate and adaptive response. He is currently investigating how lenacapavir, a novel HIV-1 capsid inhibitor, and various latency reversal agents affect HIV-1 antigen presentation during acute and latent infection. Gaining a better understanding of how antiretrovirals and latency reversal agents affect immune killing is essential to the development of an effective HIV-1 cure strategy

Research interests

Daan’s research interests currently focus on the need for a cure for HIV-1. A major barrier to finding a cure is the development of latent infection, a stage during natural infection that is characterised by an absence of expression of viral genes, rendering infected cells immunologically invisible.
In the past years, a lot of effort has gone into the development of the so-called 'shock and kill-strategy', which attempts to reactivate viral transcription with the use of latency reversal agents, relying on the cytotoxic effect of acute infection and killing by immune cells to clear HIV-1 infected cells.
This treatment is combined with antiretroviral therapy, to avoid new infections. While reactivation of latent infection has been achieved in people living with HIV, an insufficient amount of cells are killed to eradicate all infected cells. This raises the question of whether latency reversal agents and antiretroviral drugs affect the immune response, thereby slowing down the 'kill' in 'shock and kill'.

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