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Dr. Mikulas Popovic, M.D., Ph.D., basic researcher at the IHV and professor at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, was recognized in 1992 as one of the 100 most-cited authors for the period 1981-1990, was trained at Comenius University and the Cancer Research Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.
He began his career in his home country, joined the National Cancer Institute in 1980 as an American Cancer Society Fellow and remained as a visiting associate, visiting scientist and senior investigator of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology until 1989. He has been a visiting scientist at Deutsches Primatenzentrum, Gottingen, Germany; a senior research scientist at Advanced BioScience Laboratories in Kensington, Md., and a visiting scientist at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. He has been with the Institute of Human Virology since its opening in 1996 and was recently elected to the prestigious Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Career highlights have included development of a system for the continuous propagation of the cytopathic human retrovirus HIV-1 in T4+ permanent cell lines. The large-scale production of the virus permitted its identification as the etiologic agent of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and the development of specific reagents which then permitted the development of a blood bank assay.
His work today includes biological and immunologic studies of HIV1-p17, the matrix protein (MA) of the virus; persistence of HIV-1 proteins, particularly MA, in germinal centers of lymph nodes; and immune-modulating activities of Tat in vitro and in vivo using small animal models.
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