Dr. Steven Yukl is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and a staff physician at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His research focuses on the mechanisms that allow HIV to persist despite immune defenses and current antiviral therapies. In addition to HIV-induced immune dysfunction, these barriers to HIV cure include the ability of HIV to establish a reversibly-silent ("latent") infection in some CD4+ T cells, the persistence of larger numbers of infected cells in the tissues, and the possibility that HIV medicines do not stop all viral replication. The goals of current research include: 1) to determine the mechanisms that govern latent HIV infection in the blood and tissues; 2) to measure the degree to which different therapies reverse HIV latency and lead to death of HIV-infected cells in vivo; and 3) to identify the best model for testing new therapies and combinations designed to disrupt latent HIV infection.
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