[5] Her PhD research, carried out under François-Loïc Cosset, involved looking at adapting retroviruses to use as tools for gene therapy, seeking to expand their tropism and target them to specific cells by manipulating the retroviral envelope.
[4] After earning her PhD, Hatziioannou moved to the United States, where she joined the lab of Stephen Goff at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow.
This has made it difficult to study HIV-1/AIDS in animal models and much of Hatziioannou's work involves identifying and overcoming restriction factors for HIV-1 and other lentiviruses.
[6] In 2009, she demonstrated that swapping out just the Vif gene allowed HIV-1 to infect pigtail macaque monkeys, whose TRIM5 they (and others) had found didn't bind to the HIV-1 capsid.
In a collaboration with Paul Bieniasz, she developed pseudovirus assays that use a harmless virus modified to express the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein and a fluorescent reporter - she could then test for the presence of neutralizing antibodies (antibodies capable of blocking infection) by looking at the ability of these pseudoviruses to infect cells in a dish (and thus make them glow) in the presence of blood plasma taken from convalescent patients.