About The Meeting

The Annual International Meeting of the Institute of Human Virology actually began in the mid-1970s at NIH as a small gathering of collaborators when Dr. Robert C. Gallo was Chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD, much before the 1996 opening of the Institute of Human Virology. In subsequent years the meeting grew to include discussions of: tumor cell biology, retrovirology, HIV/AIDS, among others. It rapidly expanded after the discovery of the first human retrovirus, HTLV-I, by Gallo and his colleagues in 1980.

When the University of Maryland recruited Gallo, Bill Blattner (also of the National Cancer Institute) and Bob Redfield (Walter Reed Army Hospital) - to create a bench-to-bedside Institute, the meeting followed to its current home with the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

In 2010, the meeting was moved to Tropea, Calabria, Italy- its first time in a non-US venue - and enjoyed tremendous success in this beautiful international location on the Tyrrhenian Sea. We are currently scouting sites in Europe and around the Mediterranean for the 2012 meeting. If you are interested in collaborating with the Institute to host the 2012 meeting, contact IHV at ihvmeeting2011@ihv.umaryland.edu for additional information.

In the past, this 3-5 day scientific meeting attracted as many as 500 scientists, clinicians, and pharmaceutical representatives from across the globe.