Research Interview: Professor Ravi Gupta

Professor Ravi Gupta joined Homerton as a Professorial Fellow in October 2019, in the wake of mass media interest.

RESEARCH INTERVIEW

As the scientist responsible for treating ‘The London Patient’ – the second ever case of a patient being effectively ‘cured’ of the HIV virus, 12 years after the first – he was in demand as an interviewee everywhere from Radio 4’s Today programme to the New York Times. In a profile on our website in March of this year, he discussed the challenges of HIV, as the London Patient revealed his identity in another wave of publicity.

Two weeks after the profile appeared, normal life had been put on hold in response to a different virus altogether.

“I went to Boston to present a paper on the London Patient, and the meeting was cancelled just after I arrived,” he says, recalling the speed with which things changed. “The United States was closing its borders just as I left.” With the University shut down for all but Covid-related research, the focus of Ravi’s work rapidly switched to the new threat.

“When lockdown happened and things got very scary, we all thought ‘what can we do?’” he says. “Point of care testing came up immediately as something which needed to be made possible. I bumped into Helen Lee, CEO of a company called Diagnostics for the Real World, which had been making machines to monitor HIV via a finger prick test, and we began investigating whether we could use the same machine to test for Covid-19.”

Without a rapid and accurate test, hospitals were unable to identify infected asymptomatic patients. A single infected patient could spread the virus rapidly, allowing other patients and staff to take it home.

“The first thing in my mind was the need to be able to diagnose patients as they come in, both to avoid exposure and to speed up their discharge. We now have 20 testing machines in operation, which are being used in hospitals, prisons and care homes, and we hope to be able to roll them out more widely.”

While studying Medicine at Cambridge (his first College affiliation was to Downing), Ravi also took courses from the Human, Social and Political Sciences Tripos, and was fascinated by the juxtaposition of medicine and politics – a juxtaposition which has been highlighted by the varying national responses to the pandemic.

He then completed a Masters in Public Health at Harvard, before undertaking malaria research on the Thai/Burmese border. As a junior doctor he chose infectious diseases as his focus, working in Paris during the SARS outbreak, before completing a PhD in drug resistant HIV at UCL.

Now Professor of Clinical Microbiology and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Clinical Science at Cambridge, Ravi moved to Cambridge last summer with his wife, a trainee surgeon at Addenbrooke’s, and their three small daughters.

While this year has been frightening, frustrating and alarming for all of us, for Ravi it’s hard to avoid the feeling that this, after all, is what he trained for.

“In a sense it’s very exciting. The whole world has shut down, but we’re this microcosm of activity and purpose. If we can’t deal with this and respond, we’re wasting our time.”

Professor Ravi Gupta