Linos Vandekerckhove

Prof. Linos Vandekerckhove graduated at the Medical School KULeuven in 1998 and obtained his PhD in 2006 at the Rega Institute (Leuven).

He combined his infectious disease specialist education program with a PhD in the laboratory for Molecular Virology of Professor Debyser (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium).

With this combination he bridges the gap between Clinical Infectious Diseases at the AIDS clinic and basic Molecular Virology research. In 2008, he received a clinical fellowship from the Flanders Scientific Institute, which allowed him to start up a basic research HIV laboratory at the University Ghent.

In 2010, he felt the need to expand his knowledge on HIV cure research and decided to go to one of the high level research groups in the US, being the Gladstone Institute under the umbrella of Eric Verdin and Warner Greene.

Over the last years, his group has established a platform to collect in depth tissue samples from HIV+ patients, by leucapheresis, lymph node excision, gut bioptions etc, in collaboration with a patient ‘clinical research guiding group’. This initiative has been recognized as a best practice initiative for in depth sampling.

In Europe, the group has pioneered HIV quantification based on ddPCR platforms and moved towards in depth qualitative characterization of the viral reservoir. The group works closely together with the Mathias Lichterfeld lab at Harvard and with the Rafick Sékaly lab at Emory University.