The Dutch physician Joep Lange, who has died aged 59 in the crash of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine, was one of the world's top clinical Aids researchers. Along with his partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren, and other delegates, he was flying from Amsterdam to the International Aids Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The event was organised by the International Aids Society, of which he was the president from 2002 to 2004.
As a young doctor specialising in infectious diseases at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam in 1983, in the early days of the Aids epidemic, Joep led research on the clinical evolution of HIV infection as part of the now historic Amsterdam cohort studies on Aids. In seeking to understand the causal relationship be tween HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and Aids (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), he and his colleagues demonstrated that severe immunological abnormalities happened very early on after infection, that virus load and replication were instrumental in the pathogenesis of Aids, and that there are major infection reservoirs of HIV. His early work led to his 1987 PhD thesis on "serological markers in HIV infection", showing among other findings that high levels of HIV core protein p24 are a key determinant of disease progression.
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