Published in the Bulletin of Experimental Treatments for AIDS Summer 1999 issue, by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Related BETA Article:
Jay A, Levy, MD: HIV/AIDS Research at the Millenium

Summer 1999 Table of Contents

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Profile: Jay A. Levy, MD,
AIDS Researcher

Jay A. Levy, MD, an AIDS and cancer researcher and educator at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, is Professor in the Department of Medicine and Research Associate in the Cancer Research Institute. He is head of the Laboratory of Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at UCSF. After earning his MD from Columbia University in 1965, Dr. Levy conducted research that focussed on the Epstein-Barr virus and reovirus infections in Burkitt's lymphoma at the University of Pennsylvania.

From 1967 to 1970, Dr. Levy was Staff Associate at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD, where he studied DNA and RNA oncogenic (cancer-causing) viruses. In the summer of 1970, he traveled to the forests of Uganda to search for evidence of Epstein-Barr virus and infectious hepatitis in wild chimpanzees. In 1971, he spent a year in Paris working in the area of retroviruses and cancer. In 1972, Dr. Levy was appointed Assistant Professor at UCSF's Department of Medicine, where he established a laboratory for the study of tumor viruses; he has been a full Professor since 1985. He has conducted studies with many different viruses, including the herpes-, pox-, papova-, adeno-, and retroviruses. His research has taken him to the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and the Pasteur Institute in France.

During the past 17 years, Dr. Levy and his researchers have dedicated their efforts to the biologic, immunologic, and molecular studies of HIV, and have published extensively on HIV and AIDS.

In 1983, Dr. Levy codiscovered HIV, which he originally called the AIDS-associated retrovirus (ARV). He pioneered heat-treatment studies that demonstrated how to inactivate HIV in clotting factor preparations. This approach, for which he received the Murray Theilan Award from the National Hemophilia Foundation, protected many hemophiliacs from HIV infection.

Dr. Levy was the first to report the presence of HIV in the brain and to link it to neurologic disease. His group was also the first to demonstrate the ability of CD8 lymphocytes to control HIV replication and is currently pursuing approaches to use this response in therapy. Moreover, he is presently conducting studies directed at the development of an AIDS vaccine.

In addition, Dr. Levy has been pursuing the viral etiology of the cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma. His group confirmed earlier work demonstrating a herpes-like virus in Kaposi's sarcoma lesions, and showed the same sequences in the peripheral blood B-cells. He helped develop a sensitive assay for detecting antibodies to this agent and has demonstrated the infectivity of this human herpesvirus.

Dr. Levy is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Award of Distinction from the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR). He has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Wesleyan University, and more recently an Honorary Degree in Science from that university. Last year (1998) he was named by the San Francisco Examiner one of the ten most influential people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Levy has published over 400 scientific articles and reviews and is the author or editor of 13 books dealing with viruses and immunology, including his acclaimed four-volume series, The Retroviridae, and his seminal book, HIV and the Pathogenesis of AIDS, now in its second edition.

Page last updated 5 October 1999