Dr. Robert Striker University of Wisconsin, USA

Robert Striker is a physician scientist. His PhD thesis was in microbiology. He has cared for patients with HIV and other immunocompromised patients for over twenty years at the University of Wisconsin. He completed the Medical Scientist Training Program at Washington University St Louis. He did a residency in San... read moreFrancisco early in the HIV therapy era. He did an Infectious Diseases fellowship at Stanford. His clinical interests include chronic infections, particularly viral hepatitis, and HIV. Over the last 10 years, Dr Striker, and other clinical researchers have demonstrated that the degree of immune competence can be measured patients by comparing relatively simple immune parameters such as the CD4/CD8 ratio. How much this ratio deviates from a healthy, unstressed level of approximately 2 CD4 T cells in the peripheral blood for each CD8 T cell correlates with poor outcomes. These outcomes include not just infectious outcomes, but also the likelihood to develop specific cancers such as HPV related anogenital cancers, lymphomas, and lung cancer. While currently speculative, he is working to determine if this information could enhance clinical decision making. Theoretically some patients could be screened more or less frequently based on risk profiles including the immunes system.