International Society for antiviral research

Virus Emergence at the Human-Animal Interface

Prof. Edward Holmes, FAA, FRS

The University of Sydney, Australia

Eddie Holmes is an NHMRC Leadership Fellow and Professor of Virology in the School of Medical Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia, which he joined in 2012. Eddie received his undergraduate degree from the University of London (1986) and his PhD from the University of Cambridge (1990). Between 1993-2004 he held various positions at the University of Oxford, including University Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Fellow of New College. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA) in 2015 and of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017. In 2020 he won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Science and Engineering, and in 2021 he received the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. He was recently awarded the Croonian Medal and Lecture 2024 by the Royal Society.

Platforms for Clinical Development of Therapeutics for Acute Viral Infections

Dr. Jenny Low, MBBS, MPH

Singapore General Hospital, Duke NUS Medical School

Dr. Jenny Low is a senior consultant with the Department of Infectious Diseases in Singapore General Hospital and Professor at the Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme at Duke NUS Medical School. Concurrently, she is the co-director of the Viral Research and Experimental Medicine Centre at SingHealth Duke-NUS (ViREMiCS) in the SingHealth Duke NUS AMC, and deputy clinical and scientific director at the SingHealth Investigational Medicine Unit (IMU). Dr. Low has been doing clinical research for more than 20 years. She has a long track record in conducting proof of concept and early phase clinical trials in acute viral diseases. She has tested several first-in-human therapeutics and biologics in humans including a therapeutic anti-yellow fever virus antibody that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, among her contributions, she led a clinical study that was among the first to detail the host response to severe COVID-19 which was published in Cell Host & Microbe in 2020. She also led the COVID-19 self-amplifying mRNA vaccine trial that was co-developed by Duke-NUS and Arcturus therapeutics among others. The vaccine is currently licensed for use in Vietnam and Japanese. Her current research focus is on early phase adaptive clinical trials of viral therapeutics and vaccine development as well as understanding the role of the early immune responses in modulating the outcome of infection or vaccination. She has been twice awarded the National Clinician Scientist Award in 2016 and 2019 for her research in host immune response to viral infections.