Tokameh Mahmoudi is Professor in the departments of Pathology, Biochemistry and Urology at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, in The Netherlands. She attended the University of California Berkeley, USA, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree. She studied for her Master’s at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Canada, and her PhD in Molecular Medicine at Leiden University Medical Centre, The Netherlands. As a trained biochemist, she applied her expertise to mechanistic dissection of the molecular events that drive viral pathogenesis and latency during her postdoctoral studies at the University of California San Francisco, the Gladstone Institutes in the lab of Eric Verdin, and later in stem cell-based technologies in the lab of Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute.
Tokameh is a recipient of the prestigious European Research Council starting grant. She is an advisory member of the Dutch government’s Chemistry Council (NWO) and a former advisory member of the Dutch Aidsfonds (2014-2020). She is co-founder of the Erasmus MC HIV Eradication Group and PI member of the Dutch NL4Cure consortium (working to translate basic advances in HIV and HBV cure research into the development of novel therapeutics).
Tokameh’s research uses an integrated approach where the precise molecular and functional consequences of gene regulation are leveraged to unravel an effective pharmacological approach to modulate and target processes in three disease states: HIV latency, HIV persistence and HBV related liver cancer. Unravelling the molecular determinants that drive tumorigenesis, or viral gene expression, requires a multidisciplinary approach carried out in the context of state-of-the-art patient-derived disease platforms. The ultimate goal is the discovery of “drug-able” molecular targets in each disease model, using in vitro platforms, organoids and co-cultures, unbiased screens, single-cell approaches and omics.
Towards an HIV-1 cure, Tokameh’s lab has a track record in drug discovery, mechanistic and functional characterization of candidates, ex vivo validation of compounds in patient-derived models, development of reservoir quantitation technologies, and clinical translation through proof-of-concept clinical trials, including LUNA, the first “shock and kill”-based HIV-1 cure trial in The Netherlands.