Robert Seder, MD

Chief, Cellular Immunology Section, Vaccine Research Center at NIAID, NIH

Speaker

Dr. Seder received his BA at Johns Hopkins University in 1981, his MD degree at Tufts University in 1986, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in 1989. From 1989-1993, he received postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Immunology at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under Dr. William Paul. In 1994, Dr. Seder became Chief of the Lymphokine Regulation Unit in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at NIAID focused his efforts on T cell memory in the context of how vaccines and adjuvants mediate protective immunity. In 2000, Dr. Seder joined the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), NIAID as Chief of the Cellular Immunology Section. At the VRC, Dr. Seder continued his work on T cell memory and was the first to show that multi-functional cytokine T cell responses were critical for mediating protective immunity against intracellular infections following vaccination. In addition, his work focused on how adjuvants and vaccine formulation and delivery influence protective immunity in mouse and non-human primate (NHP) models of HIV, Malaria, Tuberculosis and therapeutic cancer vaccines. Dr. Seder was the first to show that intravenous vaccination of an attenuated malaria vaccine induced high level tissue resident T cells in the liver NHP. These findings were then translated to humans demonstrating that intravenous immunization of an attenuated malaria vaccine conferred high level protection in malaria naïve human volunteers in the US. In collaboration with the CDC, he has recently completed a Phase II clinical vaccine trial in 5-12 month old infants in Africa to assess the clinical efficacy of the attenuated malaria vaccine in the field. The importane of intravenous vaccination has recently been extended to prevention of TB infection in NHP in which BCG vaccination induced a high frequency of tissue resident T cells in the lung. Finally, Dr. Seder has recently developed a nanoparticle-toll like receptor agonist platform for personalized cancer vaccines using neo-antigens. It is anticipated this work will be advanced to the clinic over the next year.