Ashwin Balagopal
Johns Hopkins Medical School
Dr. Balagopal is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, and a member of the Center for Viral Hepatitis Research at Johns Hopkins University. He attended MIT for his undergraduate studies and received his medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He completed his residency and chief residency in internal medicine at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Larry Schlesinger at the Ohio State University studying macrophage biology. He then completed a clinical and research fellowship at Johns Hopkins University under Drs. Dave Thomas and Stuart Ray, completing his training in Infectious Diseases. After joining the faculty in 2009, Dr. Balagopal has provided care of patients with HBV, HCV, and HIV-1 in his longitudinal care clinic.
Dr. Balagopal’s lab has been focused on developing high-resolution techniques for the detection and quantification of viruses in human tissues (hepatitis C virus [HCV], hepatitis B [HBV], and HIV-1). He has reported the first quantifications of viral nucleic acids HCV and HBV in liver tissues taken from people who were chronically infected. He has also performed the first characterization of HIV-1 in tissue resident macrophages (liver macrophages or Kupffer cells) taken from people who were virologically suppressed with antiretrovirals. More recently, Dr. Balagopal has applied his tools to samples taken from people longitudinally to characterize the effects of antivirals on viral replication in persons with chronic HBV infection.