The definition of a pioneer for Prof Ravindra Gupta is someone who has the ability to foresee some of the world’s biggest problems and find solutions.
It was this that drove him into HIV drug-resistance research and to lead the team that cured the “London Patient” of HIV, the second such case in the world.
As a result of his groundbreaking work, the 45-year-old London-based virologist, also a senior faculty at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in Durban, was recently named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in the Pioneer category.
That’s been difficult personally to get these messages and you see it’s out of desperation and stigma. I get a lot of them from India and SA.
— Ravi Gupta
“It’s nice, but you feel slightly uneasy that the accolade is put on one person, but actually it’s the effort of many. What I like is that [the achievement] is about virology, which for many years has been kind of ignored as something worthwhile to do in life,” Gupta told Sunday Times Daily in a Zoom interview.
“The fact that I am Indian and there is diversity in that list I really like. I really think that is a powerful thing in the world we live in, that is trying to change from one society to another,” he added.
Gupta’s nomination in the magazine was written by Adam Castillejo, who until March 2020 was only known as “the London Patient”. In the article, Castillejo spoke about the respect he had gained for Gupta.
“Through the years, our partnership has developed and strengthened as Gupta has shared his knowledge and his enthusiasm to find a feasible cure for everyone. He has championed me and empowered me to become an ambassador of hope to millions of people living with HIV around the world,” wrote Castillejo.
“It was very touching to have him write that. I was very honoured that he wrote it because it told an angle that was beyond the scientific part which you could read up on in a website. He said some things there that are not to be found elsewhere,” said Gupta.
The pair’s journey began in 2016 when Castillejo received a bone-marrow transplant for his lymphoma. His donor carried a mutation that impeded the ability of HIV to enter cells, which meant the transplant essentially replaced Castillejo’s immune system with one resistant to the virus.
“It was an incredible experience because we had read about the Berlin patient, but nothing had happened for 10 years, so we thought this wasn’t going to work because statistically this doesn’t work very frequently, if at all. So we thought maybe the Berlin patient was a random chance event which does happen in biology,” said Gupta.
Since the breakthrough he has been inundated with requests for the procedure despite the risk. Though the cure was effective in Castillejo’s case and was intended to cure his cancer, it is not a practical option for the curing of HIV.
“That’s been difficult personally to get these messages and you see it’s out of desperation and stigma. I get a lot of them from India and SA – those are the two places with the highest number of cases, so that’s where you’d expect to get these messages from,” he said.
Because of Covid-19 and travel restrictions Gupta has had to put on hold his work with AHRI, an independent research institute for HIV and TB. Before the pandemic he was visiting SA once every two months and had been researching how HIV affected the brain.
“I think that Covid-19 will potentially have a negative impact on HIV, but from what I have heard in KZN from my colleagues, I get the impression that Covid hasn’t hit SA quite so hard overall. Obviously there was the first wave and a number of deaths,” he said.
Gupta has shifted his attention to the testing of rapid diagnostic kits for antibodies that will help in producing faster results after testing. Gupta hopes this will have an impact in SA’s response.
“It’s nice to do science as a general knowledge thing, but in a pandemic you want answers to questions quickly. Next we are looking at why inflammation is so bad in people with Covid. We are trying to understand if the virus is escaping from antibodies so we are using our revolutionary skills from HIV and have adapted a lot of our skills to Covid, such as sequence analysis,” he said.
“I always see myself as some who applies himself to problems. I thought drug resistance would be a problem, and I foresaw it and started working on it five years in advance, and it came to fruition because the thing I worked on was high risk, and no one was interested in it at that time,” he added.
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