Professor Andrew Lever FMedSci
Professor of Infectious Diseases
University of Cambridge
Elected Fellow 2000
molecular biology of retroviruses including HIV, rotaviruses, RNA structure and function
Dr Andrew Lever is Reader in Infectious Diseases and Honorary Consultant Physician in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. During an NIH Fogarty Fellowship at the Dana Farber Institute he acquired an interest in retroviral packaging, and in the potential use of retroviral vectors for human gene therapy. This has provided his principal research theme. His main contribution has been to define the site and secondary structure of the packaging signals in the viral RNA of HIV and related retroviruses. This is an important contribution towards understanding how these viruses are assembled and is also an essential step in adapting them for use as gene vectors.