Prof Marta Boffito, MD, PhD, FRCP, MBA is a consultant physician and the Clinical Director of HIV, Sexual and Gender Health, Dermatology at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and is academically affiliated to Imperial College London, London, UK.

She trained in Italy, the USA, and the UK and has a special interest in antiviral drug pharmacology: from prevention to treatment. She runs numerous research projects and clinical trials (including COVID-19, flu, HIV, TB vaccines and treatments).

She consults on complex pharmacological issues, sees patients with HIV (she founded the first HIV over-50-years clinic in London, UK), and teaches HIV medicine, infectious diseases and pharmacology at Imperial College and in various National and International settings, including the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where she has established some training initiatives on the management of people living with HIV.

She contributes to the educational, scientific, and guideline-formulation activities of national and international bodies including the British HIV Association (BHIVA), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and UNICEF (Eastern Europe and Central Asia). She has been involved in capacity building programmes for resource-limited settings (e.g., Uganda) and is an applicant on numerous successful collaborative international grants. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, editorials, and reviews.

Bio

Bio

Bio

Bio

Goedele Maertens is a Professor in Retrovirology at Imperial College London, UK. She received her BSc in Chemistry and MSc in Biochemistry from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL, Belgium). During her PhD in Biochemistry at the KUL, with two years training in the Engelman lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA), she investigated the interactions between HIV-1 integrase and its host factor LEDGF/p75. Following a four-year postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Oncology at Cancer Research UK (London, UK) she joined the Cherepanov lab at Imperial College London where she trained in structural virology. Since 2011, Maertens runs her laboratory at Imperial College London. Her research interests include mechanisms and inhibition of retroviral integration with a particular focus on human T-cell lymphotropic virus. Since 2025 she is the Head of Section of Virology within the Department of Infectious Disease.

Bio

Bio

Bio

Bio

Bio

Bio

André van de Ven

Medical education at Ghent University and Diploma Tropical Medicine and International Health at Leopold Institute Antwerp. Six years employment by Dutch and Botswana government as tropical doctor in Botswana, followed by specialization internal medicine and infectious diseases at Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Defended PhD thesis cum laude on side effects of cotrimoxazole in HIV infection at Radboud University.

Worked for five years as medical specialist and academic researcher at Maastricht University and thereafter at Radboudumc as head Infectious Diseases and professor International Health with special focus on research capacity building in low and middle income countries through translational studies on infectious diseases. Since 2019, Andre van der Ven, together with Mihai Netea, is coordinating the 2000HIV study, that applies a multi-omics approach and functional immunological assays to better understand HIV biology and its complications.