Melanie Ott

Ott is a member of UCSF’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute’s COVID consortium. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ott and her team of collaborators worked to reequip and recertify an unused biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) research laboratory at University of California, San Francisco in order to study SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A BSL-3 laboratory allows researchers to study infectious agents, such as the novel coronavirus, which can cause serious diseases in humans. Her team also received training in how to work with the virus without risking infection, though Ott has commented to the press that the limited stock of personal protective equipment is a cause for concern as they proceed with their research.

Ott has worked to understand HIV transcription and viral latency within host cells as targets to eradicate the spread of the virus. HIV inserts its genome into its host cell’s DNA; in this form, the virus is known as a provirus. While antiretrovial drugs are able to prevent the spread of actively transcribed and replicating HIV, they cannot target HIV provirus that is laying dormant in the host genome. Eliminating latent provirus is therefore essential for eradicating the virus. Ott and her team have worked on developing a “shock and kill” strategy to reactivate and flush out latent HIV provirus so that the immune system and antiretroviral drug therapies can kill off dormant viruses. Her laboratory has been exploring repurposing cancer drug therapies that target epigenetic machinery to reactivate latent HIV provirus. They have studied both the effect of inhibiting the function of deacetylases to loosen the host’s heterochromatin structures to restart HIV transcription and of activating the viral transcription protein Tat. In a 2017 study, they targeted the human enzyme SMPD2, which allows HIV to remain latent. They were able to reactivate latent provirus in about one-quarter of human cells donated by HIV patients.

In 2002, Ott joined the Gladstone Institutes, an independent research center affiliated with University of California, San Francisco. Her research group focuses on understanding how viruses interact with and hijack the host cells they infect, studying HIV, the Hepatitis C virus, and Zika virus. In light of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, her research group has also taken on studying the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).

In 1994, Ott moved to New York to pursue her Doctorate in Molecular Medicine from the Picower Graduate School Of Molecular Medicine, now known as the Elmezzi Graduate School of Molecular Medicine. There, she worked in the laboratory of Eric M. Verdin where she studied gene regulation and epigenetic related to HIV infection. After she graduated in 1997, Ott became a Junior Investigator at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany where she remained until 2002.

Ott was born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany. She received her Doctor of Medicine degree in 1991 from the University of Frankfurt/Main. From 1991 to 1994, she led the ICU unit at Goethe University Hospital. There, 90 percent of the patients were HIV positive and all died without any treatments available. While she was originally trained as a neurologist, her experience during the HIV/AIDS crisis drew her to virology with the hopes that she could contribute to better treatments—and eventually a cure.