Dr. Janet Siliciano is a Professor of Medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Lead of Project 3 for the Duke Center for HIV Structural Biology, alongside her husband, Dr. Robert Siliciano.
Dr. Siliciano directed the longitudinal study that measured the long-term stability of the latent reservoir for HIV-1. This study demonstrated that because of the extraordinary stability of HIV-1 reservoir, eradication of HIV-1 with antiretroviral therapy alone would not possible. It is now widely accepted that latently infected resting CD4+ T cells are the major barrier to curing HIV-1 infection. She also led the first study to define the nature of HIV-1 integration sites in resting CD4+ T cells from infected individuals.
Dr. Siliciano has extensive experience with a variety of other cellular and molecular assays used to detect latently infected cells. She led the study which showed that widely used PCR based measures of the reservoir greatly overestimate the size of the latent reservoir because most proviruses are defective. Her lab has recently developed a more accurate method of measuring the HIV-1 reservoir using a digital droplet PCR assay that separately quantitates intact and defective proviruses. In addition, her team recently demonstrated that the proliferation of latently infected cells is driven largely by responses to antigen, a finding with important implications for HIV-1 cure strategies. Finally, for the basis of Project 3, she led the study showing that autologous neutralizing antibodies block outgrowth of a substantial fraction of reservoir viruses.