The Cherry lab has a long-standing interest in host-pathogen interactions, and particularly emerging viruses. She has pioneered the use of high-throughput cell-based screening to study these viruses and virus-host interactions. She is the Scientific Director of the UPENN High-throughput screening core that implements many high-throughput assays and uses robotics to perform extensive dose-response studies and combination studies. The Cherry lab is using this technology to perform high-throughput screens and dose response studies against a diverse array of coronaviruses within Projects 1 and 2. Validation studies using complex systems including air-liquid interface cultures elevate candidates within the program. In addition, her lab has HTS assays for additional viral pathogens of pandemic potential that are studied within this Program including flaviviruses and alphaviruses and is contributing to those Projects as well.
Team Category: Project Team
Dr. Jonsson is a Professor and is the Van Vleet Chair of Excellence in Virology, Director of the Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), and Director of the Institute for the Study of Host-Pathogen Systems at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center (UTHSC) in Memphis. She is the program director for a newly NIH awarded Center of Excellence for Encephalitic Alphavirus Therapeutics. She has over 28 years of experience in the study of highly pathogenic human viruses represented in more than 122 publications and 5 patents. Her research program focuses on basic and translational research targeting respiratory, encephalitic, and hemorrhagic fever viruses. As a Professor and Director, she brings a unique blend of professional experience and leadership skills gained from her positions over the past 35 years in industry, academics, and not-for-profit institutes. She has led several major cross-institutional, multi-disciplinary efforts funded by NIH, DoD, and NSF in drug discovery and virus ecology/discovery.
Mat Todd was born in Manchester, England. He was educated at Cambridge University where he obtained an MA in Natural Sciences in 1995 and a PhD in organic chemistry (with Chris Abell) in 1999. He was then a Wellcome Trust postdoc at The University of California, Berkeley (99-00), a College Fellow back at New Hall (now Murray Edwards) College, Cambridge University (00-01), a Lecturer in Chemistry at Queen Mary, University of London (01-05) and between 2005 and 2018 was at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney where he moved from Lecturer to Associate Professor. He is now Professor and Chair of Drug Discovery at University College London (2018-present).
His research interests include the development of new ways to make molecules, particularly how to make chiral molecules with new catalysts. He is also interested in making metal complexes that do unusual things when they meet biological molecules or metal ions. His lab motto is To make the right molecule in the right place at the right time, and his students are currently trying to work out what this means.
He has a significant interest in open science, and how it may be used to accelerate research, with particular emphasis on open source discovery of new medicines. He founded and currently leads several open science consortia such as Open Source Malaria (OSM) (see the group’s research page) and is a founder of a broader Open Source Pharma movement. In 2011 he was awarded a New South Wales Scientist of the Year award in the Emerging Research category for his work in open science and in 2012 the OSM consortium was awarded one of three Wellcome Trust/Google/PLoS Accelerating Science Awards. For his open source research, Mat was selected for the Medicine Maker’s Power List in 2017 and 2018. He is on the Editorial Boards of PLoS One, ChemistryOpen and Nature Scientific Reports. He has been a sabbatical visitor at Stanford, UCSF, the Broad Institute and Pembroke College, Oxford. He lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and two children. He is related to Trevor Horn and, apparently, Samuel Crompton.
Dr. Long Ping Victor Tse is an Assistant Professor in the department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at Saint Louis University. Growing up in Hong Kong, Dr. Tse moved to the US for college. He received his B.S. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from UCLA in 2007, and his PhD in Microbiology from Cornell University in 2014. Dr. Tse did his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after which he started his lab at SLU in 2022.
AViDD focus: Evolution is the best engineer in nature. Inspired by the elegance of evolution, Tse lab uses multiple innovative approaches to 1) identify and validate non-canonical/novel druggable targets and 2) contour a complete resistant landscape of selected direct-acting antivirals.
Dr. Kathie Seley-Radtke is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her medicinal chemistry research focuses on targeting coronaviruses, filoviruses, flaviviruses among other infectious diseases, using her novel “fleximer” nucleoside/tide scaffolds. The fleximers have shown potent, broad-spectrum activity across many families of viruses and due to their flexibility, can retain their potency when confronted with binding site point mutations. Because of their potential to treat numerous pathogens of pandemic concern, as well as their ability to overcome variants and resistance mechanisms, the fleximers are of high interest all of the projects in the UNC READDI AViDD consortium. Dr. Seley-Radtke is currently the President of the International Society for Antiviral Research (ISAR), as well as a past President and current Secretary for the International Society for Nucleosides, Nucleotides & Nucleic Acids (IS3NA), Editor in Chief of Annual Reports in Medicinal Chemistry, and Associate Editor of Science Advances/AAAS and Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy.
Dr. Willson is the Harold Kohn Distinguished Professor in Open Science Drug Discovery at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Chief Scientist of the SGC-UNC site. He has over 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical research with a track record in discovery of first in class clinical candidates. He led the Glaxo program on orphan nuclear receptors that used chemical biology to uncover their role in regulation of human metabolism. He was codiscoverer of the FXR agonist obeticholic acid, an FDA-approved breakthrough drug for liver diseases. His lab discovered the mechanism of action of the diabetes drug pioglitazone (PPARg agonist) and the psoriasis drug tapinarof (AhR agonist). He is widely recognized for scientific leadership in chemical biology and was named one of the world’s 400 most influential biomedical researchers. Dr. Willson has been a long-time supporter of precompetitive chemistry in early drug discovery and was an early advocate of the SGC Chemical Probes project. His current laboratory at UNC works closely with pharma companies and academic investigators to develop small molecule chemical probes for understudied (dark) proteins that are then openly shared with the scientific community. His lab has developed the Kinase Chemogenomic Set (KCGS) that contains selective inhibitors of more than 200 kinases. He is currently the co-PI of the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative AViDD Center (READDI-AC) that seeks to create drugs for viruses of pandemic potential.
Dr. Sheahan is an NIH funded virologist working at the host pathogen interface to develop new methods of viral control. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from the University of New Hampshire in 1999, he moved to Boston to try to make a career in punk rock music but soon realized that he enjoyed pipetting more than playing guitar. In 2003, he began his graduate training at UNC Chapel Hill with Dr. Ralph Baric focusing coronavirus (CoV) spillover and the design broadly acting vaccines and therapies. After postdoctoral studies on hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the laboratory of 2020 Nobel Laureate Dr. Charles M. Rice at the Rockefeller University, he became an Investigator at GlaxoSmithKline working to develop host targeting antivirals to treat acute respiratory infections. Tim became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in 2015. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sheahan and colleagues generated preclinical proof-of-principle data that remdesivir and molnupiravir were broadly active against the CoV family suggesting these antivirals could be employed to treat future emerging CoV. This work helped accelerate the clinical testing of these antivirals in early 2020. Sheahan is currently working to develop broad-spectrum inhibitors of emerging CoV and is also developing mouse models of chronic hepacivirus infection within which to study the effect of antiviral therapy on the development of liver disease and cancer. Sheahan has been active in communicating the importance of antivirals during the pandemic on television and print media including a feature in GQ Magazine. Three new human CoV have emerged in the past 20 years. Thus, for READDI-AC, Dr. Sheahan is leading efforts to develop novel inhibitors of the CoV replicase and helicase.