Dr. Larry Corey is an internationally renowned expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development, and the former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. For more than four decades, he has led some of the most significant advances in medicine, including the development of safe and effective antivirals for herpes, HIV and hepatitis infections. An international expert in the design and testing of vaccines, he is helping to formulate a global, strategic response to COVID-19. Earlier this year, he responded to the sudden emergence of COVID-19 by redirecting his energies to speed the development of antiviral medications and vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic. He is building strategic collaborations among academic institutions, government health leaders and the pharmaceutical industry to test future COVID-19 vaccines and find ways to manufacture and distribute enough doses to immunize as many as 4 billion people. Dr. Corey is drawing on his expertise as a co-founder, in 1998, of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Headquartered at Fred Hutch in Seattle, it is the world’s largest publicly funded collaboration focused on development of vaccines to prevent HIV/AIDS. Dr. Corey's teaching and mentoring interests include virology, viral immunology and development of novel therapies for viral infections. His current research projects include: - Spatial and functional characterization of tissue resident immune responses at the site of herpesvirus or HIV infection - Development of immunotherapies for HSV and HIV infection; including CAR T cells for treatment for HIV infection - Spatial dynamics and function of adoptively transferred or vaccine induced T cells - Characterization of tissue-based memory B cells and the role antibody effector responses play in chronic viral infections - Use of monoclonal antibodies for the prevention of viral infections In addition to his role as president and director emeritus at Fred Hutch, Dr. Corey is a member of the Center's Vaccine and Infectious Disease, Clinical Research, and Public Health Sciences Divisions. He is also a Professor, Medicine and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Washington, and Principal Investigator at the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN).
“COVID-19 is a re-living of what happened 39 years ago in HIV, when it was difficult and frustrating,” he said. “The lesson that we learned then is that when the academic, biotech and pharmaceutical communities put their collective scientific assets together, things happen. Science is about resilience. You have to have optimism, resilience and perseverance.”
-
Many viruses, including HIV and hepatitis C, have thwarted vaccine developers. But the new coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), doesn’t appear to be a particularly formidable target. It changes slowly, which means it’s not very good at dodging the immune system, and vaccines against the related coronaviruses that cause SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) have worked in animal models. Corey heads the United States’s HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which has seen one candidate vaccine after another crash and burn, is optimistic about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. “I don’t think this is going to be that tough.”
-