ESWI Summit 2024: What's in the pipeline?

Ruth A. Karron, M.D.

Professor, International Health

Bloomberg School of Public Health

Joint Appointment, Pediatrics

School of Medicine

Johns Hopkins University

Dr. Karron is a pediatric infectious diseases physician, virologist, and vaccinologist, Professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Director of the Johns Hopkins Vaccine Initiative.  Dr. Karron has substantial experience in the evaluation of respiratory virus vaccines in adult and pediatric populations.  Her research interests also include the development of immune responses to respiratory viral infections in early life, the epidemiology of RSV and other respiratory viral diseases in low resource settings, and public policy and ethical issues related to vaccine development and distribution. Dr. Karron has been a member of a number of national and international vaccine advisory committees and panels, including the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the COVAX ACT-acclerator COVID Vaccine Maternal Immunization Working Group, and is a current member of the GAVI VIS Steering Committee. She has chaired the FDA Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and the Vaccines Advisory Panel for the Wellcome Trust, and currently chairs the WHO Product Development for Vaccines Advisory Committee (PDVAC). In 2016, Dr. Karron received the Robert M. Chanock award for outstanding lifetime contributions to RSV research. 

MD, PhD, Head of Paediatrics, Director of Translational Paediatrics and Infectious Diseases at the Hospital Clínico Universitario de Santiago (Spain), Associate Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Santiago and Academician of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery of Galicia.
His main research interests are: vaccines, infectious diseases, meningococcal disease, host genetics, and biomarkers. He has directly managed or directed as PI more than 50 competitive research projects (2 FP7, 4 H2020 and 3 IMI2), 80 phase I to III vaccine clinical trials, and 25 collaboration grants related to infectious diseases and genomics.

Johan Neyts (CV) is full professor of virology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He teaches virology at the medical school and at the school of dentistry. His lab has a long-standing expertise in the development of antiviral strategies and drugs against emerging and neglected viral infections (such as dengue and other flaviviruses, Chikungunya, enteroviruses, noroviruses, coronaviruses, HEV and rabies). His lab is also intensively involved in the development of antivirals against SARS-CoV2. A second focus of the lab is the development of novel vaccine technologies. To that end the yellow fever vaccine is being used as a vector.  Using this technology the team developed a potent single shot SARS-CoV2 vaccine candidate. The PLLAV (Plasmid Launched Live Attenuated Virus) technology, together with the team of Prof. Kai Dallmeier also developed in his lab, allows to rapidly engineer highly thermostable vaccines against multiple viral pathogens. Johan Neyts is past president of the International Society for Antiviral Research (www.isar-icar.com). He is the co-founder of KU Leuven spin-offs AstriVax www.astrivax.com and Okapi Sciences. Four classes of antivirals discovered in his laboratory have been licensed to major pharmaceutical companies (two on HCV, one on dengue and one on rhino/enteroviruses). He published >625 papers in peer reviewed journals and has given ~300 invited lectures; he is regularly interviewed by lay-press.