Michael S. Saag (born October 2, 1955) is a physician and prominent HIV/AIDS researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He holds the Jim Straley Chair in AIDS Research, is Director of the Division of Infectious Disease and of the William C. Gorgas Center for Geographic Medicine, and Director of the Center for AIDS Research. He is also the founder of the 1917 Clinic, a comprehensive AIDS treatment and research center at UAB [1] Saag is a frequent lecturer at AIDS conferences around the world and is credited with performing pioneering clinical trials for several antiretroviral drugs now in common use for HIV treatment and for first demonstrating the clinical value of "viral-load testing" in HIV/AIDS treatment. [2] In 2009 Saag was elected chairman of the HIV Medicine Association of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. [3] In 2019 Saag began serving on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. [4]
Saag appeared in the 2001 PBS documentary Evolution describing how HIV can evolve to newer drug-resistant strains in the course of hours. [5] He is co-author of a 2007 textbook, AIDS Therapy and editor of the Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy and the Sanford Guide to HIV/AIDS Therapy. On April 14, 2014, Saag released his first book Positive published by Greenleaf Book Group, LLC. [6]
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(January 2021) |
Saag was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from Ballard High School in 1973 and was a three-year starter at offensive guard and defensive tackle for the Bruins football team. He completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Tulane University in 1977. He was also president of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity and was a creative film maker while at the university.
He graduated from medical school at the University of Louisville and completed his residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at UAB.
Dr. Saag is married to Amy Weil Saag. His children are Andrew, Harry, and Julie.
In March 2020, Dr. Saag contracted (and ultimately recovered from) COVID-19. [7] Since his recovery, Dr. Saag has spoken out publicly about the need to wear masks and maintain social distancing.
David Da-i Ho is a Taiwanese American AIDS researcher, physician and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He championed for combination anti-retroviral therapy instead of single therapy, which turned HIV from an absolute terminal disease into a chronic disease.
The management of HIV/AIDS normally includes the use of multiple antiretroviral drugs as a strategy to control HIV infection. There are several classes of antiretroviral agents that act on different stages of the HIV life-cycle. The use of multiple drugs that act on different viral targets is known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). HAART decreases the patient's total burden of HIV, maintains function of the immune system, and prevents opportunistic infections that often lead to death. HAART also prevents the transmission of HIV between serodiscordant same-sex and opposite-sex partners so long as the HIV-positive partner maintains an undetectable viral load.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NIAID's mission is to conduct basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.
Douglas D. Richman is an American infectious diseases physician and medical virologist. Richman's work has focused on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, since its appearance in the early 1980s. His major contributions have been in the areas of treatment, drug resistance, and pathogenicity.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine is the medical school of the University of Alabama at Birmingham located in Birmingham, Alabama, United States with branch campuses in Huntsville, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa. Residency programs are also located in Selma, Huntsville, and Montgomery. It is part of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the UAB Health System, one of the largest academic medical centers in the United States.
Merle Alden Sande was a leading American infectious-diseases expert whose early recognition of the looming public health crisis posed by AIDS led to the development of basic protocols for how to handle infected patients. He graduated from Washington State University and received his MD degree from the University of Washington, School of Medicine in Seattle.
Michael Stuart Gottlieb is an American physician and immunologist known for his 1981 identification of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) as a new disease, and for his HIV/AIDS research, HIV/AIDS activism, and philanthropic efforts associated with HIV/AIDS treatment.
Jeffrey P. Nadler was an American Infectious Diseases and HIV/AIDS expert. His most recent position had been as Acting Director and Assistant Director of the Therapeutics Research Program, Division of AIDS (DAIDS), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) where he oversaw NIH/NIAID-sponsored national and international HIV/AIDS research.
Julio S. G. Montaner, is an Argentine-born Canadian physician, professor and researcher. He is the director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the chair in AIDS Research and head of the Division of AIDS in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and the past-president of the International AIDS Society. He is also the director of the John Ruedy Immunodeficiency Clinic, and the Physician Program Director for HIV/AIDS PHC. He is known for his work on HAART, a role in the discovery of triple therapy as an effective treatment for HIV in the late 1990s, and a role in advocating the "Treatment as Prevention" Strategy in the mid-2000s, led by Myron Cohen of the HPTN 052 trial.
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Robert "Chip" T. Schooley is an American infectious disease physician, who is the Vice Chair of Academic Affairs, Senior Director of International Initiatives, and Co-Director at the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH), at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. He is an expert in HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) infection and treatment, and in 2016, was the first physician to treat a patient in the United States with intravenous bacteriophage therapy for a systemic bacterial infection.
Diane Havlir is an American physician who is a Professor of Medicine and Chief of the HIV/AIDS Division at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research considers novel therapeutic strategies to improve the lives of people with HIV and to support public health initiatives in East Africa. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
Charles Williams Flexner is an American physician, clinical pharmaceutical scientist, academic, author and researcher. He is a Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
John Gill Bartlett was an American physician and medical researcher, specializing in infectious diseases. He is known as a pioneer in HIV/AIDS research and for his work on vancomycin as a treatment for Clostridioides difficile infection.
Howard E. Gendelman is an American physician-scientist whose research intersects the disciplines of neuroimmunology, pharmacology, and infectious diseases. Gendelman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His research is focused on harnessing immune responses for therapeutic gain in HIV/AIDS and Neurodegenerative disease. He is the Margaret R. Larson Professor of infectious diseases and internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha.
James M. Oleske is an American pediatrician and HIV/AIDs researcher who is the emeritus François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Professor of Pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. He is best known for his pioneering work in identifying HIV/AIDS as a pediatric disease, and treating and researching it beginning in the 1980s. He published one of the first articles identifying HIV/AIDS in children in JAMA in 1983 and was a co-author of one of the articles by Robert Gallo and others identifying the virus in Science in 1984.
Judith Aberg is an American physician who is the George Baehr Professor of Clinical Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was appointed Dean of System Operations for Clinical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research considered infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.