Marta Massanella Luna

Marta Massanella graduated in Biology at the University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and completed her PhD in Biomedicine at IrsiCaixa under the supervision of Dr. Julià Blanco in 2012. During her PhD, she characterized the immunodiscordant response to ART in HIV-treated individuals and she was involved in several ART-intensification studies. Later on, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Douglas Richman at the University of California San Diego as a post-doctoral fellow, where she developed several assays to quantify the size of the HIV reservoir.

In 2015, she joined Dr. Nicolas Chomont´s laboratory to carry on her studies on the HIV reservoir in the CR-CHUM (Montreal, Canada). Her studies focused on the characterization of different CD4 T-cell subsets in the maintenance of the HIV reservoir. She was also involved in several clinical projects to determine the influence of timing of ART initiation on the establishment and persistence of the HIV reservoir in adults and the paediatric population.

In 2020, she pursued her research as principal investigator at IrsiCaixa to understand the principal mechanisms that contribute to the particular and accelerated immunoaging in the HIV-infected ART-treated population.