Moderated by Sadie Whittaker, our chief scientific officer and a You + ME Registry architect, this three-part series brings together those collecting data on Long Covid to share preliminary findings and answer questions from our virtual audience.
Dr. Bhupesh Prusty, Scientist / Principal Investigator at the Institute for Virology and Immunobiology at University of Wuerzburg joined Dr. Whittaker for Session II.
Dr. Prusty studies interactions between persistent intracellular bacterial and viral infections that sometimes result in the potentiation of both pathogens. He has published several papers on the role of chlamydia pneumonia in activating latent HHV-6 including inherited chromosomally integrated HHV-6. Work by Dr. Prusty on the mechanism of reactivation of ciHHV-6 published in PLoS Genetics is cited as a seminal contribution to understanding this condition, which affects approximately 1% of the population.
Dr. Prusty received a Ramsay Award from Solve M.E. to explore the hypothesis that mitochondrial dysfunction in ME/CFS has a pathogenic connection, which led to a publication in ImmunoHorizons. He also received an award from the Volkswagen Stiftung program to pursue his work on HHV-6 reactivation. Dr. Prusty won the HHV-6 Foundation Young Investigator Award for Excellence in Basic Science. He was a post-doctoral researcher in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Professor Harald zur Hausen at the German Cancer Research Center studying human endogenous retroviruses and earned his PhD in biosciences from Jamia Millia Islamia in India.
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