Organizing Committee Member
Richard T Wyatt
Professor
Scripps Research Institute
USA
Biography
Richard T Wyatt, Ph.D. received his Doctorate in Immunology from Tufts University School of Medicine at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences in Boston, MA. Currently Dr. Wyatt is a Professor in Immunology in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Virology, Frontiers in Immunology and Vaccines. He is a member of the Scripps CHAVI-ID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CAVD, the UCSD CFAR Grant Review Committee, is a member of the AmfAR American Foundation for AIDS Research Cure Working Group and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has co-authored over 160 peer-reviewed articles, predominantly focused on the HIV-1 envelope glycoproteins (Env) as antigens and immunogens. Dr. Wyatt was formerly a Senior Investigator and Chief of the Structural Immunology Section at the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH in Bethesda, MD and is a charter member of IAVI’s Neutralizing Antibody Consortium. And has been listed on the Thomson-Reuters World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds and Highly Cited Researchers. Dr. Wyatt’s research focuses on the structure, function and especially the immunogenicity of the HIV-1 Env, the only virally encoded proteins on the surface of the virus. Because many viral vaccines protect against disease by the elicitation of neutralizing antibodies.
Research Area
Dr. Wyatt’s lab studies engineered HIV-1 Env trimers as candidate vaccine immunogens and at the atomic level of structural resolution to gain insight in how to better elicit antibodies directed against these variable, heavily glycosylated neutralizing determinants. His lab generates a diverse array of well-ordered, homogeneous trimers to elicit HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) to date only elicited during natural HIV infection. Recently, Dr. Wyatt’s laboratory is exploring interactions of particulate immunogens with B cells to learn rules of immunogenicity to forward HIV -1 vaccine development and is also using bNAbs in focused curative modalities.