Greg Towers is a Professor of Virology at UCL, and his work focuses on the interactions between retroviruses (principally HIV) and their mammalian hosts. Work in Professor Towers' laboratory is directed towards understanding how hosts can protect themselves from viral infection using their innate immune system and how viruses evolve to antagonise or escape these processes to successfully infect their hosts. This antagonistic evolution results in a molecular arms race between the virus and the host proteins, referred to as restriction factors. Restriction factors show species specificity, which results in differential susceptibility between primate species. For example HIV, the cause of AIDS, infects humans but not monkeys. Likewise simian viruses infect their specific hosts but not other monkeys or humans. Professor Towers' group is taking advantage of this specificity to dissect the molecular details of how the interactions between anti-viral molecules and invading virus occur. During this work they collaborate with colleagues in Cambridge to determine the structure of host anti-viral restriction factor molecules that may offer protection from HIV infection.

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