Medical School Professor Gary Nabel named Director of National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center

Gary Nabel and David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology, with President Bill Clinton at the cornerstone dedication of the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland in June.

Gary Nabel, M.D., Ph.D., has been appointed the first director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. The Center’s initial focus is to develop vaccines against HIV. Prior to his appointment, Nabel was the Henry Sewall Professor of Internal Medicine, professor of biological chemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the University of Michigan Medical School.

“Gary Nabel is a superb scientist who has excelled at the frontiers of virology, immunology, gene therapy and molecular biology,” said NIH Director Harold Varmus, M.D. “As a result of his experiences with clinical and laboratory research in academia and extensive interactions with industrial partners, he is remarkably well prepared to lead the complex, multidisciplinary and collaborative activities that will be required to develop an effective HIV vaccine. His recent work — on novel strategies for gene therapy for AIDS and for vaccines against cancer and Ebola virus — illustrates the imagination and drive he will bring to the NIH Vaccine Research Center.”

Nabel’s interest in HIV gene therapy began with basic research and progressed systematically to clinical studies. He and his colleagues developed Rev M10, a competitive inhibitor of the HIV Rev protein, which is required for HIV replication. The Rev M10 gene, when introduced into cells, makes a protein that prevents authentic REV from binding to the cell, thereby short-circuiting HIV’s replication cycle.

In 1996, they reported on the first HIV gene therapy trial, in which three HIVinfected patients had been infused with their own CD4+ T cells that had been modified with the Rev M10 antiviral gene. The scientists found that CD4+ T cells containing Rev M10 survive longer in the blood than unmodified cells, with no adverse side effects. His group continues work to improve this novel therapeutic strategy.

Nabel is also one of the first researchers to develop a DNA-based therapeutic vaccine against cancer. He and his colleagues have used direct gene transfer to introduce therapeutic proteins into patients with melanoma. Their clinical studies were among the first to demonstrate the feasibility and safety of this approach. He also has applied his gene therapy expertise to the deadly Ebola virus. In late 1997, Nabel led a group of researchers who reported on their successful experiments in guinea pigs showing that a DNA-based vaccine could generate protective immune responses to Ebola virus.