Peter Hunt is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Experimental Medicine at UCSF and Co-Director of the UCSF-GIVI Center for AIDS Research for Basic and Translational Science. His primary research focus is on the inflammatory consequences of HIV infection. His translational research program seeks to understand both the mechanistic causes and clinical consequences of persistent immune activation in treated HIV infection, including its impact on age-related morbidity and mortality as well as HIV persistence. He also conducts pilot clinical trials of novel immune-based interventions designed to decrease immune activation and recently completed a term as Chair of the Inflammation Committee of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). Dr. Hunt has also led a translational research program in Mbarara, Uganda, focused on the predictors of immune recovery and mortality during suppressive antiretroviral therapy in that setting and has helped develop a large mucosal immunology program at San Francisco General Hospital focused on the impact of HIV on gut-associated lymphoid tissue and the determinants of microbial translocation in HIV infection. His laboratory’s more recent work has focused on the impact of the inflammatory state on vaccine responsiveness and on the contribution of asymptomatic CMV infection to multiple inflammatory pathways in treated HIV infection. This latter work has led to a large clinical trial in the ACTG (A5383) and multiple linked NIH grants, which will assess whether treating asymptomatic CMV replication in treated HIV infection not only reduces systemic inflammation, but also reduces surrogate markers of cardiometabolic disease and CNS inflammation.
