Marilia Pinzone is an infectious diseases physician-scientist with a research interest in studying how HIV reservoirs are formed and maintained. As an independent investigator, Dr. Pinzone is working on identifying new mechanisms that drive chronic inflammation during antiretroviral therapy (ART). She also investigates the factors that drive poor immunological recovery and non-AIDS comorbidities in people living with HIV infection.
After completing her residency in Italy, Dr. Pinzone was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the O’Doherty Lab. She then came to Washington University in St. Louis to complete her Infectious Diseases Fellowship and joined the Shan Lab. During her fellowship, Dr. Pinzone was named a 2023 Dean’s Scholar, a WashU Medicine program that provides funding and mentorship for up to two years to support early-career physician-scientists as they pursue lab research. After completing her fellowship in 2024, she joined WashU Medicine as an Instructor in Medicine and was promoted the following year to Assistant Professor of Medicine.
Dr. Pinzone’s clinical time is spent on the general inpatient ID service, as well as in the outpatient setting, where she sees patients, mostly people living with HIV (PLWH) in the ID clinic. Her key interests are outpatient care of PLWH, infectious diseases and metabolic complications of HIV.
Infectious Diseases Clinic
620 South Taylor Ave., Suite 100
St. Louis, MO 63110
- Medical Degree: University of Catania Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, Catania, Sicily
- Post-doctoral fellowship: University of Pennsylvania
- Specialist, American Academy of HIV Medicine (AAHIVM)
- Pinzone MR, Weissman S, Pasternak AO, Zurakowski R, Migueles S, O’Doherty U. Naive infection predicts reservoir diversity and is a formidable hurdle to HIV eradication. JCI Insight 2021;150794. doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.150794.
- Venanzi Rullo E*, Pinzone MR*, Cannon L, Weissman S, Ceccarelli M, Zurakowski R, Nunnari G, O’Doherty U. Persistence of an intact HIV reservoir in phenotypically naive T cells. JCI Insight 2020;5(20):e133157. doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.133157.
- Pinzone MR, VanBelzen DJ, Weissman S, Bertuccio MP, Cannon L, Venanzi-Rullo E, Migueles S, Jones RB, Mota T, Joseph SB, Groen K, Pasternak AO, Hwang WT, Sherman B, Vourekas A, Nunnari G, O’Doherty U. Longitudinal HIV sequencing reveals reservoir expression leading to decay which is obscured by clonal expansion. Nat Commun 2019;10(1):728. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-08431-7.