From Adversary to Ally: Reimagining Viruses as Medicines

Dr. Scharenberg is the founder and CEO of Umoja Biopharma. Umoja is pioneering a viral vector technology to deliver genes directly to a patient’s immune cells to engineer them to fight cancer. Before Umoja, Andy co-directed the Program in Cell & Gene Therapy at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. From 2000 to 2020, he was an attending Physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital, a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He earned his MD from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, completed residency at the UNC Children’s Hospital and his fellowship in immunology at NIH and at the Division of Experimental Pathology, Beth Israel Hospital.

Dr. Strathdee is an Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences & Harold Simon Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. She co-directs UCSD’s center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH) & the International Core of UCSD’s Center for AIDS Research. Her work is focused on HIV prevention in marginalized populations in developing countries and has published >750 peer-reviewed publications. She co-authored her memoir, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. It discusses how she & others sought bacteriophage therapy to save her husband from a life-threatening bacterial infection. She was named as one of TIME’s 50 Most Influential People in Health Care in 2018.

Dr. Racaniello is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University Medical Center and has been studying viruses for over 40 years. Over the years his laboratory has studied a variety of viruses including poliovirus, echovirus, enteroviruses 70 and D68, rhinovirus, Zika virus and hepatitis C virus. His goal is to be ‘Earth’s virology professor’ and he is the creator of the “This Week in Virology” podcast. In recognition of his contribution to microbiology education, he was awarded the Peter Wildy Prize for Microbiology Education by the Society for General Microbiology, American Society for Microbiology Award for Education, the Richard C. Ernst Lecture, and the American Society for Virology Wolfgang & Patricia Joklik Distinguished Service Award.