March 18, 2004

UCSD Researcher Douglas Richman
Named To Riford Chair For AIDS Research

By Sue Pondrom

Douglas Richman, M.D., UCSD School of Medicine professor of pathology and medicine, director of the UCSD AIDS Research Institute, and director of the Research Center for AIDS and HIV Infection at the VA San Diego Healthcare System, has been named to the endowed Florence Seeley Riford Chair for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Research at UCSD. The previous chair holder was Flossie Wong-Staal, M.D., who retired from the university in December 2001.

Trained as an infectious disease physician and medical virologist at Stanford University, the National Institutes and of Health, and Harvard University before joining the UCSD faculty in 1976, Richman has focused his investigation on HIV disease and pathogenesis for the past 20 years.

Since coming to UCSD, he has published more than 480 original research articles, reviews, and book chapters, and he is the senior editor of the major textbook of medical virology, Clinical Virology. Richman is or has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Veterans Administration, the World Health Organization, the State of California, and he’s been honored with an NIH Merit Award and the Howard M. Temin Award for Clinical Science and Clinical Excellence in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS.

His laboratory at UCSD was the first to identity HIV drug resistance. The lab also joined two others in identifying latently infected CD4 cells as the obstacle to eradication of HIV with potent antiretroviral therapy. Recently, his team described the dynamics of the neutralizing antibody response to HIV and the rapidity of viral escape and evolution in response to this selective pressure.

Current research in Richman’s lab focuses on the natural history and molecular pathogenesis of HIV in a cohort of acutely infected patients. These studies include the cell mediated and neutralizing antibody immune responses to HIV and the viral escape and evolution in response to these. He is interested in the epitopes that elicit the neutralizing antibody responses to autologous virus in human infections and the viral mutations that account for escape from these responses.

“We are interested in characterizing the epitopes that elicit the too infrequent broadly reactive neutralizing responses in some patients,” he said. “This information is central for the development of an effective HIV vaccine.”

Additional studies in his lab include studies of HIV drug resistance, the pathogenetic consequences of virus replication in anatomic compartments and viral latency.

Richman is regularly asked to serve as visiting professor nationally and internationally and is invited as a keynote speaker at numerous national and international conferences. He has helped organize and chair several important regular international meetings including the HIV Drug Resistance Meeting, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, and the AIDS Vaccine Research Committee International HIV Vaccine Meeting.

Media Contacts: Sue Pondrom (619) 543-6163