Welcome

The scale of the global HIV pandemic is difficult to grasp. UNAIDS estimates over 40 million people have been infected worldwide. Huge breakthroughs in understanding have been made and there are now many antiretroviral drugs but still no effective vaccine. Both in the developed world, and, with expanding access to antiretrovirals, in the developing world, it has become vital we use those drugs most effectively while continuing to learn how the virus adapts to the human host.

HIV has acquired resistance to all drugs available, which can be transmitted. Nation-wide surveillance programmes monitoring the transmission of drug resistant HIV based on HIV sequences provide an important resource which can reveal much about the structure of the epidemic in different risk groups. We are studying the pattern and dynamics of viral transmission in the UK population using an evolutionary approach to the analysis of viral sequences, incorporating information on the date each sample was taken to reconstruct time-resolved phylogenies. This allows us to link viral evolution to HIV epidemiology.

We also analyse the genetic basis of viral phenotypes, including drug resistance and virulence, using techniques from statistics, quantitative genetics and informatics, to develop models of how it interacts with the human host and how it responds to antiretroviral therapy.

Another pandemic, 2009 H1N1 influenza ("swine flu"), recently infected the global human population. Influenza killed more people in the last century than HIV has done so far. The swine flu pandemic fortunately had lower mortality than previous influenza pandemics, but more influenza pandemics are inevitable, and the H5N1 avian influenza strain remains endemic in poultry in some parts of the world. We are also studying genome sequences of influenza viruses to identify genetic determinants of virulence and host range and track the changes in the genome of swine flu as it transitions into a seasonal influenza.

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