Virulence profile

Where did you perform your internship/residency and what field of specialization did you choose? I attended the Sackler Medical School of Tel Aviv University in Israel. As part of the hospital rotations I trained at Internal Medicine Department E at the Sheba Medical Center, the largest hospital in Israel. I was captivated by the internal medicine discipline and its complete consideration of the whole patient, and there was no question in my mind that this was the physician I wanted to become. I was drawn to the excellence of Internal Medicine Department E, and to the quality of the people within it, and was lucky to eventually complete my fouryear residency there. I was honored to be part of the amazing legacy and group of outstanding physicians on that ward, who educated me as a physician and as a person, and instilled in me the best medical roots possible. From that point on I always feel as though Drs Farfel, Pauzner, Mouallem, and Mayan are walking with me in the hospital halls, no matter where in the world I am. It is an amazing and empowering feeling. In my internship year, during the rotation in pediatrics, I had a 4-y-old patient with AIDS who was failing antiretroviral therapy with no remaining treatment options. I remember reading day and night about this new syndrome, about this patient’s situation and of the thennew medication stavudine (d4T) that had been approved by the US FDA a few months earlier. Watching the evolution of a recently discovered medical condition and the progress made on it in real-time to advance knowledge and help save lives of patients affected by it, were exciting. This convinced me, perhaps subconsciously initially, of my interest in this virus. During residency, I continued to take care of HIVinfected patients as they would increasingly be admitted. I spent my research time in Prof Jonathan Gershoni’s HIV research laboratory and set up an assay to identify the then recently-described CCR5 delta 32 deletion, which confers resistance to HIV infection, and examined its occurrence in different HIVinfected populations. Our findings of its highest prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews and its effect of a slower progression to AIDS in heterozygous patients with hemophilia were my first exposures to HIV research that greatly augmented my clinical experience and scientific curiosity. The path from there to my interest in an infectious diseases fellowship was paved.