A Shot at Survival: Progress and Challenges in New and Emerging Vaccines

Speakers

Roger Glass, MD, PhD

National Institutes of Health
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Roger Glass is director of the Fogarty International Center at NIH and the associate director of NIH for International Research. He completed his undergraduate, medical, and public health studies at Harvard and spent many years at CDC as chief of the Viral Gastroenteritis Unit. His research interests were initiated by spending four years in Bangladesh working on the control and prevention of diarrheal diseases, a main cause of death among children in the developing world.

Since then, he has continued to seek new ways to prevent diarrheal diseases through the use of vaccines. His work has led him to train and collaborate with scientists from more 60 countries and under his leadership, his group has published more than 500 scientific papers on the diagnosis, control, and prevention of diarrheal diseases. Glass is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Debbie Saslow, PhD

American Cancer Society
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Debbie Saslow is the director of breast and gynecologic cancer in the Department of Cancer Control Science at the American Cancer Society's National Home Office in Atlanta. Saslow is responsible for the scientific content of the Society's breast and gynecologic cancer policies, materials, programs, and communications. Saslow manages the review and update of the Society's guidelines for the early detection of both breast and cervical cancers, and recently led the development of ACS guidelines and position statements for the HPV vaccine. She has been instrumental in building collaborative relationships with organizations across the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.

Before joining the American Cancer Society, Saslow was coordinator of the President's National Action Plan on Breast Cancer (1994–1997). She is a frequent lecturer on cancer screening, genetic testing, cancer epidemiology, disparities, HPV and HPV vaccines. She is an author on more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institutes' Laboratory of Pathology in Women's Cancers. She received her undergraduate degree in biology with honors from Brown University, and her PhD in human and molecular genetics from Yale University.

Keith Klugman, MD, PhD

Emory University
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Keith Klugman is the William H. Foege Chair of Global Health in the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, in Atlanta, GA, USA. He is also a professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases of the School of Medicine at that university and a visiting researcher in the Respiratory Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He is the co-director of the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand, the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Klugman is a member of the executive committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases and chair of the International Committee of the American Society for Microbiology, the largest single life science society, with over 42,000 members worldwide. The umbella organization of all national microbiology societies is the International Union of Microbiological Societies, of which Klugman is currently vice chair. He has chaired expert committees for the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Wellcome Trust in London. He serves as an editor or member of the editorial board of eight international journals on medicine, infectious diseases, and antimicrobials.

Klugman's research interests are in antibiotics, antimicrobial resistance, and vaccines for bacterial pathogens—particularly the pneumococcus. He has published more than 350 papers on these subjects to date.

Christopher Plowe, MD, MPH

University of Maryland
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Christopher Plowe is a physician and malariologist who leads a multidisciplinary clinical translational malaria research team at the University of Maryland's Center for Vaccine Development, with field sites in Malawi, Central Africa, and in Mali, West Africa. He is presently leading malaria vaccine trials in Mali, but he is best known for his work on the molecular epidemiology of drug resistant malaria. Working with African colleagues, his group at the University of Maryland developed rapid molecular assays to detect drug resistant malaria and used these tests to understand the population genetics of malaria and to control malaria outbreaks and inform treatment policy decisions.

Plowe has degrees in philosophy and medicine from Cornell University and in public health from Columbia University, and did fellowships in malaria research at the National Institutes of Health and in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he is a professor of Medicine and Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist. In 2007, Plowe was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in patient-oriented research.

Rino Rappuoli, PhD

Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics
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Rino Rappuoli is global head of vaccines research at Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics and is based in Siena, Italy. Previously he was head of R&D at Sclavo (Italy), and then head of Vaccine Research and CSO at Chiron Corporation.

His team developed the first recombinant bacterial vaccine (against pertussis), the first conjugate vaccine against meningococcus, and an experimental vaccine against Helicobacter pylori. Recently, his team was the first to use the power of genomics to develop new vaccines (reverse vaccinology) and used it to develop a vaccine against group B meningococcus. Among their present activities are the development of influenza vaccines produced in cell culture and the development of vaccines against avian influenza.

Among Rappuoli's scientific contributions, he was cofounder of the field of cellular microbiology, a discipline that has merged cell biology and microbiology. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).

Marilynn Larkin

Marilynn Larkin is a medical editor, journalist, and videographer based in New York City. Her work has frequently appeared in, among others, The Lancet, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, and Reuters Health's professional newswire. She has served as editor of many clinical publications and is author of five medical books for general readers as well as Reporting on Health Risk, a handbook for journalists. She is currently head of publications for The Society for Biomolecular Screening.