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.