Timothy Ray Brown, popularly known as the Berlin patient who was the first patient in the world to be cured of HIV recently died of cancer. The second patient, the London patient was cured by a team led by Professor Dr Ravindra Gupta of Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID), University of Cambridge.
Dr Gupta rose to fame after the miraculous cure of the London patient following which he was featured in the TIME Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Speaking to The Probe, Dr Gupta said that top virologists across the world may have found a right cure for HIV. “HIV was an impossible disease to cure because when this virus infects a cell it becomes latent. What this means is that it goes to sleep and it becomes a part of your DNA. One thing that we do know is that you can be protected from HIV if you have a certain genetic mutation. It's quite rare but it's more common in Europeans than anywhere else and this is a mutation in CCR 5,” he explained.
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Dr Ravindra Gupta with his team | by special arrangement
Last January, Dr Gupta was in India to give a presentation on the miraculous recovery of the London patient to a team of medical experts at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Speaking to The Probe, Dr Gupta said that lack of funding, mentoring and poor infrastructure has delayed India’s advances in HIV Research. “I think that clinical scientists and doctors like me don't have a proper research path in India and I really feel that this is one of the major problems that needs attention. There are plenty of great minds in India but I think research is not as good as it should be or could be,” he said.
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Dr Ravindra Gupta in his laboratory | by special arrangement
Sharing his career trajectory and the research path he followed, Dr Gupta said: “There are no dedicated training programmes for clinicians to become scientists in India. Here in the UK, I was able to do a PhD in the middle of my clinical specialisation and take time off and also be paid to do that. Later, I won further grants to support my salary whilst I was leading my own research group. So, these are the kinds of things that really need to be made available for the scientific community in India.”
