Team

He has been an Investigator at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research (BIIR) since 2004 and is currently a BIIR Co-Director and Director for the BIIR Center for Biotechnology.
He trained as a bacterial geneticist and received his Ph.D. from the Sydney University in Australia and trained in Molecular Biology at Stanford University, California and the C.S.I.R.O., Canberra.
He is an expert in Molecular Biology and Protein Engineering, specializing in the immune system. Most particularly, in 21 years of work at the DNAX Research Institute, he identified and characterized cytokines and their receptor interactions, including IL-13, and IL-25. He directed the DNAX Genomics Division that was immensely successful in mining expressed sequence tag data for cytokine and cytokine receptor discovery and subsequent biological characterizations.
At BIIR, he has led a vaccine-development program based on targeting antigens directly to human dendritic cells using antibody-antigen conjugates. Currently, with this platform technology our BIIR team and outside collaborators have successfully tested in human in vitro systems, as well as in mouse and monkey in vivo studies, novel vaccines against influenza, cancers, HIV, HCV, and HPV.
Vaccines based on these studies are now in clinical development for HIV-1 therapeutic and prophylactic applications and for treatment on HPV-based cancers of the mucosa.