Dr. Aurelio Cafaro got his degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1984, and his specialty in Clinical Immunology and Allergy in 1987, both at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, Italy. Since 1996, he has been a senior scientist at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS, Rome, Italy). He contributed to the building up of the Italian Concerted Action on the Development of a Vaccine against HIV/AIDS (ICAV), the EU-funded projects AVIP and MUVAPRED, as well as to the former Italy–USA project (led by Barbara Ensoli at CNAIDS, ISS and Marjorie Robert-Guroff at NCI, NIH, USA) and the ISS-Chiron (now Novartis) Joint Program for the Development of a Combined Vaccine Against HIV/AIDS (lead by Barbara Ensoli at CNAIDS, ISS and Rino Rappuoli at
Chiron/Novartis). More recently, he has actively participated in the development, design and conduction of phase I and II preventative and therapeutic clinical trials based on the Tat protein. Dr. Cafaro is the Head of the Natural and Acquired Cellular Immunity at the National AIDS Center of the ISS. His expertise encompasses HIV/SIV pathogenesis and humoral and cellular immunology in both nonhuman and human primates, which are the main topics of
the research program at the National AIDS Center.
Dr. Alessandra Borsetti, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the CNAIDS—National AIDS Center, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy. Her research interests are infectious disease; lentiviruses; HIV-1; SIV; animal models; primate; host–virus interactions; viral pathogenesis; molecular epidemiology; and the immune response to viral infections.
Paolo Monini obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry from the University of Ferrara, Italy. He previously worked as a Research Associate at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1991 and at Northwestern University from 1994 to 1995. In 1996, he was appointed to the National HIV/AIDS Research Center (CNAIDS) of the National Institute of Health of Italy, 2001, and in 2006, he was nominated Director of the R&D Section of the CNAIDS. From 2010 to 2017, he was deployed in South Africa as the Head of Project ISS of the "Program to support the Ministry of Health of South Africa in the implementation of a National Program of Global Response to HIV & AIDS”. He retired in 2023 and is now appointed as a Scientific Consultant at the CNAIDS. His research is in the fields of viral oncology, HIV-1 pathogenesis and HIV vaccine development.
Dr. Barbara Ensoli received her MD in Medicine and Surgery from the Faculty of Medicine of the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, Italy, in 1984. She received her PhD in Immunology in 1991 from the University of Bari, Italy. She then spent more than 10 years (1986-1996) at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland, USA), working at the National Cancer Institute. From 1996 to 1999, she served as the Director of Research at the Laboratory of Virology at the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy. From 2000 to 2004, she served as the director of the Retrovirus Division at the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy. From 2004 to 2005, she served as the director of the AIDS Division, Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases at the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy. From 2005 to the present, she has been the director of the National HIV/AIDS Research Center (CNAIDS) at the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy. Dr. Ensoli is involved in two main research areas: (a) Studies on the pathogenesis of HIV infection, aimed at developing a vaccine against HIV/AlDS, able to either protect from the disease (in HIV-uninfected individuals; preventative vaccine), or to control disease progression (in HIV-infected individuals: therapeutic vaccine); (b) Studies on the pathogenesis of AlDS-associated tumours, in particular of Kaposi’s sarcoma and of intra-epithelial neoplasm of the uterine cervix.
