Dr. Thor Andrew Wagner, MD

Thor Wagner, MD: Assistant Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. Dr. Wagner’s research is focused on pediatric HIV infection, which accounts for 15% of all HIV deaths. His research addresses two specific questions.

(1) Despite excellent drugs, why can’t we cure HIV? (2) Can we develop methods to diagnose HIV-infected infants in low resource settings? HIV-infected children currently face a lifetime of daily multidrug therapy. The design of curative strategies will require a better understanding of the mechanisms of HIV persistence during antiretroviral therapy. The Wagner lab is exploring two hypotheses: (1) That there is persistent low-level replication of HIV, especially at peripheral sites where the immune system is most active, such as mucosal surfaces; (2) that HIV is propagated within lymphocytes as the cells replicate. Effective HIV drugs are increasingly available worldwide, but in low resource settings, children are often not started on therapy. A major …reason is that there is no simple test available to diagnose infants with HIV. Existing tests are extremely expensive and can only be done in sophisticated laboratories. As a result, 50% of all HIV-infected children die before they are diagnosed. Dr. Wagner is collaborating with several biotechnology companies to develop promising new technology that would enable inexpensive â€spoint-of-careâ€t infant HIV testing.