Dr Landay is the Vice President of Team Science and Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. He has been involved in HIV research for over 45 years, having performed some of the first immune evaluations of HIV-infected hemophiliacs in 1981 while completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He collaborated with Abbott Labs in 1983 to help develop the first HIV antibody test that was licensed by the FDA in 1985 for use in screening the blood supply. His laboratory has made important original contributions to understanding the role of immune activation and inflammation in outcomes of non-communicable disease related to aging in the HIV population.
He has been an investigator with the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) for over 30 years and led the Rush Immunology Support Lab for 20 years since its inception. He has provided leadership to the ACTG Network labs as the Scientific Director of Laboratories and Chair of the Network Laboratory Steering Committee. In this role, he worked with the domestic and international laboratories in integrating their work with the agendas of the Transformative Science Groups (TSGs). He provided laboratory leadership for ACTG protocol development and implementation as an ad hoc member of the Scientific Agenda Steering Committee (SASC). In this role, he provided input on the scientific rationale for laboratory assays and the fiscal review of the assay cost. He provides leadership to the ACTG through committee and working group membership. He was the founder of the Therapeutic Vaccine Focus Group under the Cure TSG. He serves as the consulting immunologist to the Cure TSG; as the appointed immunologist to the Comorbidity TSG; and as a member of the steering committee. In addition, he serves as a member of the Microbiome, HIV, and Aging, and NASH/NAFLD working groups under the Comorbidity TSG. He was Chair of the Senolytics Therapeutic Working Group under the Comorbidity TSG.
He has extensive experience in aging-related studies and is co-investigator of an R33 grant that integrates the efforts of the Center for AIDS Research, Older American Independence Centers, and Shock Centers. He has participated in the Office of AIDS Research HIV and Aging Committee and has been an advisor to the United Nations UNAIDS Program on HIV and Aging. He is currently participating with the World Health Organization on producing a scoping review of HIV and aging with a goal to adopt geriatric principles into HIV guidelines and lessons from HIV into global aging guidelines. Over the past 14 years, his research focus has been on studies of geroscience and HIV and aging. His research is focused on integrating senotherapeutics into the field of HIV therapeutics. He is working to translate clinical measures in the geriatrics field that includes frailty and short performance battery measures into routine clinics to evaluate elderly subjects. His basic science work in aging has developed a systems biology approach to evaluate the human microbiome, metabolome, proteomics and epigenetics to better understand the mechanisms of healthy aging. He has published over 630 peer-reviewed papers with a focus on basic and clinical studies of HIV, with an emphasis on the role of immune activation, inflammation, and the microbiome. His work has been able to translate the basics of the field of geroscience into HIV research and demonstrate how HIV can be a valuable model for our understanding of accelerated and accentuated aging.