Research center forms new labs to fight virus
The top scientists at a prominent San Francisco research laboratory have taken charge of two new biomedical institutes designed to beat back the COVID19 epidemic by finding drugs, therapies and ways to spark the human immune system to fight the disease.
Gladstone Institutes announced this week that it will split the scientific work previously done by the Institute of Virology and Immunology, a laboratory established in 1991 to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic, into two new institutes.
Officials said Dr. Melanie Ott, a senior investigator with Gladstone, will lead the new Institute of Virology, which will study the coronavirus and search for therapies against future infectious diseases. Dr. Alexander Marson, also a senior investigator, will head the other new lab, called the GladstoneUCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, which will try to develop the next generation of cell therapies. It is a partnership with UCSF.
“They are both remarkable scientists,” said Gladstone President Deepak Srivastava. “We look forward to the discoveries that will emerge from these new institutes.”
Ott, a virologist, will focus on the development of rapid diagnostic, prevention and treatment strategies for SARSCoV2, the virus that causes COVID19.
Since COVID19 was discovered late last year in China, she has been trying to determine exactly how the virus goes about hijacking the human cellular machinery and how that process compares with other viruses. Her goal is to identify common characteristics in how coronaviruses replicate their parasitic RNA and determine where SARSCoV2 is vulnerable. The idea would be to develop treatments that can be used to interrupt the process.
“Contrary to the current strategy of combining several drugs to treat one virus, we want to develop one drug against multiple viruses,” said Ott, who is also a professor in the UCSF Department of Medicine. “As antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly urgent problem, we will also delve into how we can use viruses as therapeutics, which involves using viruses against themselves or to fight bacteria.”
Marson’s institute will combine genomics and immunology in an effort to develop cell therapies. The plan is to use gene editing and synthetic biology techniques to manipulate the human immune system so it can fight off the coronavirus and other infectious, autoimmune and neurologic diseases, including, perhaps, Alzheimer’s disease.
“These rapidly advancing fields are starting to converge in ways that are too big for any single lab to take on,” said Marson, an associate professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at the UCSF School of Medicine. “The impetus to start a new institute was the realization that we need to create an ecosystem to bring together people with different perspectives to think about transformative opportunities for how patients can be treated in the future.”
Marson’s institute will use lab space at Gladstone, which is adjacent to UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, and at the university’s Parnassus Heights campus.
“The importance of pursuing advances in virology and immunology for human health has never been more clear,” said UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood. He said the new institutes “will complement and enhance UCSF’s strengths in immunology and cell therapy and will build on Gladstone’s established expertise in the hostpathogen interface and geneediting technologies.”
Srivastava said the original plan was to find a new director for the Institute of Virology and Immunology, but Ott and Marson were equally qualified, so the recruitment panel decided to put them both in charge.
“We realized they represent complementary, rather than alternative, directions for the future of Gladstone,” he said.