Bio

Dr. Grant McFadden received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1975, from McGill University.  He has held previous tenured faculty positions at the University of Alberta, Western University, and the University of Florida and was a visiting sabbatical Professor at Harvard Medical School. He was awarded a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Molecular Virology in 2001 and in 2005 he was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholarship. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2005 and the American Academy of Microbiology in 2007. Dr. McFadden is currently a Professor at Arizona State University and is the Director of the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines, and Virotherapy (B-CIVV).  He was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal PLoS Pathogens until 2020, is currently a Senior Editor at Molecular Therapy-Oncolytics, and was the President of the American Society for Virology 2015-16. Dr. McFadden's lab pioneered the field of viral immune subversion (also called "anti-immunology"), and is credited with the discovery of a wide spectrum of virus-derived inhibitors of the immune system. His lab also investigates host-virus tropism, and the deployment of poxviruses for oncolytic virotherapy for the treatment of cancer, particularly with a rabbit-specific poxvirus called myxoma virus (MYXV). He is also currently developing human clinical trials that exploit virotherapy with MYXV to treat various cancers, for which he has co-founded a new biotech company called OncoMyx Therapeutics. To date, McFadden has published over 380 scientific papers and reviews.

Research Interest

• Discover novel viral proteins that inhibit inflammatory pathways.
• Analyze the role of intracellular signaling in poxvirus tropism.
• Develop poxviruses for oncolytic therapeutics to treat cancer.