Nancy L. Haigwood, Ph.D. Full Member, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute Viral Vaccines Program Director Professor, Department of Pathobiology, Department of Microbiology, University of Washington Email: nancy.haigwood@sbri.org

Nancy L. Haigwood, Ph.D. is a member of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI), the largest independent, non-profit research institute in the United States focused solely on infectious disease research. She is the Director of the Viral Vaccines Program at SBRI, and is also a professor at the University of Washington with joint appointments in the Departments of Microbiology and Pathobiology. Nancy and her colleagues are working to develop and test novel vaccine approaches for HIV/AIDS. In the past three years, her work has been targeted toward preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.

Nancy's interest in science began when she was a teenager, when she was inspired and challenged by one of her teachers. This spark of scientific interest coincided with her observation of the devastating effects of infectious diseases such as cholera and Dengue fever in Thailand, where she and her family lived for two years. After earning a Ph.D. in Bacteriology and Immunology from the University of North Carolina, her research focus shifted to virology when she did postdoctoral work with Daniel Nathans, M.D., at The Johns Hopkins University. Her commitment to this area of study was further reinforced while she worked at Chiron Corporation in San Francisco during the start of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. After she had her first child in 1986, she pledged to dedicate her career to seeking a vaccine against HIV/AIDS in hopes that her children and others of their generation would never have to face the onslaught of the disease. She joined SBRI in 1997 and started the Viral Vaccines Program in 2001, recruiting colleague Leonidas Stamatatos, Ph.D., from the prestigious Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York. Nancy presently leads an active laboratory group that is working toward finding a viable vaccine for HIV/AIDS.

Nancy's laboratory members-including UW graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in training--focus primarily on the immunological control of the primate lentiviruses, including HIV-1, SIV and SHIV. They are interested in understanding the role that humoral immunity, especially neutralizing antibodies (NAbs), plays in limiting infection. To this end, Dr. Haigwood and her colleagues study the development of HIV NAbs in vivo in primate models and in humans to determine how NAbs recognize sequentially diverse viruses that arise over time in infected individuals. Answers to this question may assist in the design of vaccines that can protect against all types of HIV from around the globe.

Only a few of Nancy's notable accomplishments are mentioned here. For example, while she was a scientist at Chiron, she designed, patented, and brought one of the first HIV vaccines "from the bench to the clinic". While a Member at SBRI, she developed novel vaccines that have been shown to keep viruses under control in preclinical tests, and demonstrated that treatment with high levels of antibodies significantly prolongs life and accelerates beneficial immunity. In addition, she developed a unique primate mother-to-child transmission model for understanding the role of maternal immunity in reducing infection.

As a result of her ingenuity, she has filed two provisional patent applications in the area of HIV vaccine research, along with her collaborator at SBRI, Leonidas Stamatatos Ph.D. Their applications pertain to both vaccine candidates and methods. Nancy's other collaborators include the Washington National Primate Research Center, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology, NIAID, and the NIH. Her work is supported by the NIH and a recently awarded grant from the New York-based Americans for AIDS Research (amfAR).

DWT is pleased to feature Nancy Haigwood as an Inventor of the month. We congratulate her for her persistence, creativity, and her ability to see projects through, from their formative stages to potential life-saving human therapeutics.

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