Professor Ravi Gupta

Professor of Clinical Microbiology at Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease

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Ravi Gupta has been Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases since 2019. In 2020 he was named as one of the 100 Most influential people by TIME.

Having completed his medical undergraduate studies at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, Ravi Gupta pursued a Masters in Public Health at Harvard as a Fulbright scholar. Upon return he trained in infectious diseases in Oxford and London (UCLH, Hospital for Tropical Diseases) and completed his PhD at UCL on Lentiviral evasion of antiretrovirals and innate immune responses. He established his research group at UCL in 2011 working on genetics and biology of HIV resistance and reservoirs and as promoted to full professor in 2016.

The Gupta lab has worked extensively in HIV drug resistance, both at molecular and population levels, and contributed to the appreciation of the scale of drug resistance globally. The group’s work extends to studies on HIV reservoirs in cells, particularly macrophages. His recent work is aimed at cell cycle dependent changes in macrophage biological activity and viral permissivity. This understanding is relevant to both anatomical compartments where HIV virus replication occurs in macrophages, as well as design of strategies to cure HIV.

The Gupta lab has teams in both the UK and at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban South Africa. Work focuses on two areas:

  • Studying HIV drug resistance to protease / integrase inhibitors and implications for global scale up of antiretroviral therapy (podcast link here)
  • Dissecting the biology of macrophage-virus interactions given myeloid cells are parasitised by HIV and are a difficult-to-treat reservoir.

In Spring 2020 the team validated and introduced the SAMBA II point of care test into clinical practice at Addenbrookes for rapid diagnosis of COVID-19. During the latter half of 2020 the lab started to study evolution of the virus within patients in response to antibody based therapies, as a paradigm of how new variants with multiple mutations have arisen. The team is also characterising the virology of key spike protein mutations in new variants and their impact on natural and vaccine induced immunity.

Ravi Gupta is a co-opted member of NERVTAG. The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) advises the government on the threat posed by new and emerging respiratory viruses.

Please see below for pre-prints:

Pfizer vaccine sera activity against B.1.1.7

Prelim Paper – Responses to SARS-CoV-2 following vaccination