CAFE SCIENTIFIQUE | CONVERSATION WITH Pr. JAY LEVY

MAY 16 | 6:00 pm | Ortega Campus

Free event upon RSVP | In English

Professor Jay LEVY will speak about his work and his latest research.

SPEAKER BIO

Jay A. Levy, M.D., an AIDS and cancer researcher and an educator at the University of California, School of Medicine at San Francisco (UCSF), is Professor in the Department of Medicine and Research Associate in the Cancer Research Institute. He is Director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at UCSF.

During the past 30 years, Dr. Levy and his staff have dedicated their efforts to research on AIDS. In 1983 he independently discovered the AIDS virus, HIV, which discovery has been attributed to 2008's Medecine Nobel prize Luc Montagnier and Nadine Barré-Sinoussi.

He pioneered heat-treatment studies that demonstrated how to heat-inactivate HIV in clotting factor preparations. This approach, for which he received the Murray Thelin Award from the National Hemophilia Foundation, has protected many hemophiliacs from HIV infection. He was the first to report the presence of HIV in the brain and bowel and linked it to diseases in these tissues. His group was also the first to demonstrate the ability of CD8+ lymphocytes in healthy infected people to control HIV replication by a noncytotoxic mechanism. It is mediated, at least in part, by a secreted CD8+ cell antiviral factor (CAF). This discovery presents a new insight into how the host immune system can control viral infection without killing the infected cell.

Dr. Levy is currently conducting studies directed at defining the nature of CAF, the development of an AIDS vaccine, a "functional cure" of HIV infection, and approaches for immune-based therapies.