Regulation of retroviral latency in the human genome

Professor Bangham’s programme of research aims to understand the regulation of retroviral latency and expression - a problem of central importance in natural retrovirus infections such as HIV-1 and human T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) and in gene therapy with retroviral vectors. The key goal is to identify the mechanisms by which HTLV-1 regulates its latency and so persists in the face of a strong host immune response, causing fatal and disabling diseases for which there is currently no effective treatment. Professor Bangham will exploit recent exciting discoveries by his team, and the unique advantages of HTLV-1 infection, to answer these fundamental questions in natural HTLV-1 infection and in humans treated with newly developed lentiviral gene therapy vectors. Using state-of-the-art techniques that his group has developed recently, comprising novel high-throughput mapping and quantification of proviral integration sites in vivo and mechanistic experiments in vitro, these studies will have both scientific and clinical significance in pathogenic human retroviral infections and in the rapidly developing field of gene therapy.