Meet Professor Chloe Orkin, Consultant HIV Physician at the Royal London and Professor of HIV Medicine at the Blizard Institute.
Could you tells us a bit more about your clinical work and research?
As well as running a busy HIV and HIV/HCV research unit, my specialist interest is novel anti-retroviral therapy and strategies and co-infection with viral hepatitis. I presented the first phase III trial using injectable anti-retroviral therapy. I have just ended my tenure as Chair of the British HIV Association (BHIVA), where I co-authored the Association guidelines on Anti-retroviral therapy, Hepatitis, Malignancy and Routine Monitoring. During my leadership BHIVA was been acknowledged as an early champion of the Undetectable=Untransmittable (U=U campaign).
As the current Athena SWAN Chair for the school of Medicine at Queen Mary University of London and the President-Elect of the Medical Women’s Federation I am committed to all aspects of equality in society.
You were named in Diva Media Group’s Visible Lesbian 100 list as an Influencer. What did mean to you?
The Visible Lesbian 100 is designed to highlight women who have made great strides for the LGBTQI community generally, but women-loving women in particular, and I was named in the category of powerful influencer and ‘health hero’ for my work on HIV testing.
Read the Queen Mary story here.
Your role has recently changed somewhat as you are now the clinical director of the Barts Health Covid-19 Vaccine Trial Centre. Could you tell us more about this trial and the challenges that it faces?
We are conducting a trial of a vaccine developed by Janssen -a pharmaceutical company which is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. There are 30,000 people worldwide involved in the trial, 6000 of whom are in the UK, and Barts Health have recruited around 500 participants, including people from diverse backgrounds. We hope that this vaccine will provide hope for people all around the world as it does not need to be stored in a minus 70 freezer.