Javier Martínez-Picado

Institut de Recerca de la Sida - IrsiCaixa

Life & Medical Sciences

Javier Martínez-Picado is ICREA Research Professor at the AIDS Research Institute irsiCaixa in Barcelona, an institution that works to advance clinical research and translate results into patients care. He is also associate professor at the University of Vic (UVic-UCC). He received his PhD from the University of Barcelona where he subsequently became associate professor lecturing on different microbiology-related subjects. In 1996, he joined the Massachusetts General Hospital as postdoctoral fellow of the Harvard Medical School, where he engaged in AIDS research. In 2000, he obtained a position as biomedical researcher of the Spanish Health Department appointed to the Hospital "Germans Trias i Pujol" in Badalona (Barcelona). Dr. Martínez-Picado serves on different government, academic and industry advisory boards and has published extensively on HIV treatment strategies and HIV pathogenesis in international journals.


Research interests

The main subject of our biomedical research is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), a retrovirus that can lead to Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), a condition in humans in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections. Since the beginning of the epidemic, 76 million people have been infected with HIV, of which 35 million have died from AIDS. In 2016, 1 million people died from AIDS-related causes and 1.8 million became newly infected worldwide. Our research programs are focused on understanding how HIV causes disease at the molecular and cellular level, tackling cellular and anatomical viral reservoirs, exploring new strategies to cure HIV/AIDS and collaborating on global HIV/AIDS vaccine development projects.

Selected publications

– Salgado M, Garcia-Minambres A, Dalmau J, Jiménez-Moyano E, Viciana P, Alejos B, Clotet B, Prado JG & Martinez-Picado J 2018, ‘Control of HIV-1 pathogenesis in viremic nonprogressors is independent of virus-Gag-specific CTL responses‘, J Virol 92, 12, e00346-18.

– Diaz-Varela M, de Menezes-Neto A, Perez-Zsolt D, Gamez-Valero A, Segui-Barber J, Izquierdo-Useros N, Martinez-Picado J, Fernandez-Becerra C & del Portillo HA  2018, ‘Proteomics study of human cord blood reticulocyte-derived exosomes‘, Sci Rep-UK 8, 14046.

– Bejarano DA, Puertas MC, Börner K, Martinez-Picado J, Müller B & Kräusslich H-G 2018, ‘Detailed characterization of early HIV-1 replication dynamics in primary human macrophages’, Viruses 10(11) 620.

– Salgado M et al. for the IciStem Consortium 2018, ‘Mechanisms That Contribute to a Profound Reduction of the HIV-1 Reservoir After Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplant‘, Ann Inter Med, 169(10):674-683.

– Leal L et al., iHIVARNA consortium 2018. ‘Phase I clinical trial of an intranodally administered mRNA based therapeutic vaccine against HIV-1 infection‘, AIDS 32(17):2533-45.

– Abdel-Mohsen M et al. 2018, ‘CD32 is expressed on cells with transcriptionally active HIV but does not enrich for HIV DNA in resting T cells‘, Sci Transl Med 10, 437, eaar6759.

– Puertas MC, Gómez-Mora E, Santos JR, Moltó, J, Urrea, V, Morón-López S, Hernández-Rodríguez, A, Marfil S, Martínez-Bonet M, Mata L. Muñoz-Fernández MA, Clotet B, Blanco J, Martinez-Picado J 2018, ‘Impact of intensification with raltegravir on HIV-1-infected individuals receiving monotherapy with boosted protease inhibitorsJ Antimicro Chemoth 73, 7, 1940-1948.

– Martinez-Picado J, Zurakowski R, Buzón MJ & Stevenson M 2018, Episomal HIV-1 DNA and its relationship to other markers of HIV-1 persistence’, Retrovirology 15, 15.

– Adland E et al. 2018, ‘Differential immunodominance hierarchy of CD8+ T-cell responses in HLA-B*27:05 and B*27:02-mediated control of HIV-1 infection’, J Virol 92(4).