Ravi Gupta has been Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases since 2019. Having completed his medical undergraduate studies at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, he pursued a Masters in Public Health at Harvard as a Fulbright scholar. Upon return he trained in infectious diseases in Oxford and London (UCLH, Hospital for Tropical Diseases) and completed his PhD at UCL on lentiviral evasion of antiretrovirals and innate immune responses. He has worked extensively in HIV drug resistance, both at molecular and population levels, and his work demonstrating escalating global resistance led to change in WHO treatment guidelines for HIV. Whilst Professor at UCL, he led the team demonstrating HIV cure in the ‘London Patient’ – the world’s only living HIV cure, and the second recorded in history (Gupta et al, Nature 2019). In 2020, he was named as one of the 100 Most influential people worldwide by TIME Magazine. He has deployed his expertise in RNA virus genetics and biology during the COVID-19 pandemic to report the first genotypic-phenotypic evidence for immune escape of SARS-CoV-2 within an individual, defining the process by which new variants likely arise (Kemp et al, Nature 2021), and also reporting some of the first data on Pfizer BioNTech vaccine-induced antibody responses against the B.1.1.7 Alpha variant that arose in the UK (Collier et al, Nature 2021). In addition his group has defined poorer vaccine responses in the elderly, particularly with regard to variants of concern. Most recently Gupta’s work has defined the immune escape and transmissibility advantage of the Delta variant as the drive behind global expansion of this variant.
