Genital Herpes Vaccine Development: The Friedman Lab’s Approach at UPenn

Please join us as Dr. Friedman discusses the goals of his phase 1 human trials in herpes vaccines. He will also discuss the innovations that led to the current vaccine design and ongoing studies in his lab that examine whether a vaccine intended to prevent genital herpes caused by HSV-2 may also be effective against diseases caused by HSV-1, including cold sores, eye infections, and brain infections.

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Harvey Friedman is an Infectious Disease physician at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his MD degree from McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He moved to the US after his residency training in Internal Medicine at McGill to do a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Penn. He has been at Penn ever since, working both as a physician and scientist. His time at Penn included serving as Head of Infectious Diseases for 22 years. His research focus has been on herpes simplex virus (HSV). Earlier in his career, his lab discovered two novel mechanisms by which the virus evades our immune responses, which led to a shift in the focus of his lab from basic discovery to clinically-relevant research in prevention. The new focus was on assessing if they could block the virus from using these escape mechanisms using vaccines. Blocking immune evasion is a novel approach for vaccine design, leading BioNTech SE, a German biotechnology company, to license the HSV vaccine technology from Penn. Since then, they have advanced this concept into human trials for the prevention and/or treatment of genital herpes. The vaccine trials are in phase 1 for safety and immunogenicity. BioNTech will present those results once available, which will dictate the future direction of vaccine efforts.