US based Vir Biotechnology has announced the appointment of Herbert W. "Skip" Virgin as Executive Vice President of Research and Chief Scientific Officer, effective January 1, 2018.
Reporting to CEO George Scangos and joining Vir’s management team, Dr. Virgin will lead the company’s significant and growing R&D programs to transform the care of people with serious infectious diseases.
Vir Biotech is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with operations in Portland, Oregon, Boston, Massachusetts, and Bellinzona, Switzerland. The company is taking a multi-program, multi-platform approach to applying these breakthroughs, including the development of treatments that induce protective and therapeutic immune responses.
Dr. Virgin will join Vir from Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, where he has served as the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology & Immunology since 2006.
He received A.B., M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and trained in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and in infectious diseases at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis.
He performed graduate work with Dr. Emil Unanue and postdoctoral studies with Dr. Bernard Fields. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the American Academy of Microbiology and the National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science, and is currently on the Editorial Boards of Celland Cell Host and Microbe.
Dr. Scangos said, “Skip is an internationally renowned scientist and leader who has made major contributions to the field of immunology and infectious diseases. His vision and passion for science will be invaluable to Vir as we pursue our mission of transforming the care of people with serious infectious diseases. We are fortunate that he has decided to join us, and on a personal note, I am looking forward to working with Skip and the rest of the management team to bring important new medicines to patients around the world who suffer from serious infectious diseases.”
At Washington University School of Medicine, Dr. Virgin’s laboratory has used genetic, structural, computational and sequencing methods to define mechanisms of viral pathogenesis and immunity in vivo, with many studies focusing on mouse models. They have identified the physiologic role and molecular mechanisms of several RNA and DNA virus immune evasion molecules, and studied immune effector mechanisms including ISG15, interferon-γ, interferon-λ, cGAS and autophagy genes.
