Roberta Darrigo

Background

About Roberta Darrigo

Dr Roberta D’Arrigo is currently a researcher at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome (INMI). She has a long-standing experience in the field of Virology, and in particular on HIV. She is author of 45 publications on prestigious international journals, most on HIV. Her laboratory has successfully set up methodologies for the whole HIV-1 genome sequencing, that are routinely used both for diagnostic and scientific purposes, and to determine the viral tropism. The expertise she acquired has been also employed in advanced diagnostic techniques. Dr D’Arrigo dedicated her work to implementation of a laboratory aimed at monitoring antiretroviral drugs in the field of HIV infection at the INMI. Despite the high variability of HIV genome, she standardized feasible and rapid genotyping methods for full-length HIV genome sequencing; her analytical/practical skills allowed her to create home-made systems before availability of commercial ones to determine genotypes in HIV seropositive patients detecting HIV resistance to all licensed anti-HIV compounds (Protease Inhibitors, Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors, Integrase Inhibitors, Fusion Inhibitors, CCR5 Inhibitors). The optimization of full-length HIV genome sequencing allowed her research group to begin numerous studies aimed at understanding the mechanisms of emergence HIV resistance associated with HIV disease clinical progression. In 2006 she published in Nature the use of phylogenesis for the tracing and characterization of HIV strains in Africa. She cooperates with many recognised scientific researchers in several grants from the Italian National Institute of Health (Principal Investigator on AIDS vaccination protocols), the Ministry of University and Scientific Research, and the European Community-From January 1st 2010 she is working at the U.O.C. of Clinical Biochemistry and Pharmacology, INMI L. Spallanzani, Rome as Chief Biologist, field of pharmacogenomic.