Robert Gallo

Robert Charles Gallo
Robert Gallo
Born	(1937-03-23) March 23, 1937 Waterbury, Connecticut, United States
Education	Providence College (B.S.; 1959) Thomas Jefferson University (MD; 1963)
Years active	1963–present
Known for	Co-discoverer of HIV
Medical career
Profession	Medical doctor
Institutions	National Cancer Institute
Specialism	Infectious disease and virology
Research	Biomedical research
Notable prizes	Lasker Award (1982, 1986)

Robert Charles Gallo (born March 23, 1937) is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.

Gallo is the director and co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, established in 1996 in a partnership including the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. Gallo is also a co-founder of biotechnology company Profectus BioSciences, Inc.

Early life and education

Gallo was born in Waterbury, Connecticut to a working-class family of Italian immigrants. He earned a BS degree in Biology in 1959 from Providence College and received an MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1963. After completing his medical residency at the University of Chicago, he became a researcher at the National Cancer Institute.

Career

Gallo states that his choice of profession was influenced by the early death of his sister from leukemia, a disease to which he initially dedicated much of his research.^[1]

IL-2 and retrovirus research

Robert C. Gallo (in the early eighties)

After listening to a talk by biologist David Baltimore and further stimulation from his virologist colleague, Robert Ting, Gallo became interested in the study of retroviruses, and made their study the primary activity of his lab. In 1976, Doris Morgan, a first year post-doctoral fellow in Gallo's lab, was asked by Gallo to examine culture fluid of activated lymphocytes for the possible production of growth factors. Soon she was successful in growing T lymphocytes. Gallo, Morgan and Frank Ruscetti, another researcher in Gallo's lab, coauthored a paper in Science describing their method.^[2] The Gallo group identified this as T-cell growth factor (TCGF). The name was changed in 1978 to IL-2 (interleukin-2) by the Interlaken cytokine nomenclature committee.^[3] Although earlier reports had described soluble molecules with biologic effects, the effects and biochemistry of the factors were not well characterized. One such example was the report by Julius Gordon in 1965,^[4] which described blastogenic transformation of lymphocytes in extracellular media. However, cell growth was not demonstrated and the affected cell type was not identified, making the identify of the factor(s) involved unclear.

The discovery of IL-2 allowed T cells, previously thought to be dead end cells, to be grown significantly in culture for the first time, opening research into many aspects of T cell immunology. Gallo’s lab later purified and biochemically characterized IL-2.^[5] This breakthrough also allowed researchers to grow T-cells and study the viruses that affect them, such as human T-cell leukemia virus, or HTLV, the first retrovirus identified in humans, which Bernard Poiesz, another post-doctoral fellow in Gallo's lab, isolated.^[6] HTLV's role in leukemia was clarified when Kiyoshi Takatsuki and other Japanese researchers, puzzling over an outbreak of a rare form of leukemia,^[7] later independently found the same retrovirus,^[8] and both groups showed HTLV to be the cause.^[9][10] At the same time, a similar HTLV-associated leukemia was identified by the Gallo group in the Caribbean.^[11] In 1982, Gallo received the prestigious Lasker Award: "For his pioneering studies that led to the discovery of the first human RNA tumor virus and its association with certain leukemias and lymphomas.".^[12] Gallo has won numerous subsequent awards and prizes. Gallo was the most cited scientist in the world from 1980–1990, according to the Institute for Scientific Information, and he was ranked third in the world for scientific impact for the period 1983–2002. He has published close to 1,300 papers.

HIV/AIDS research

On May 4, 1984, Gallo and his collaborators published a series of four papers in the scientific journal Science^[13] demonstrating that a retrovirus they had isolated, called HTLV-III in the belief that the virus was related to the leukemia viruses of Gallo's earlier work, was the cause of AIDS.^[14] A French team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, led by Luc Montagnier, had published a paper in Science in 1983, describing a retrovirus they called LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus), isolated from a patient at risk for AIDS.^[15]

Gallo was awarded his second Lasker Award in 1986 for "determining that the retrovirus now known as HIV-1 is the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).” He is the only recipient of two Lasker Awards.^[12] In 1986, Gallo, Dharam Ablashi, and Saira Salahuddin discovered Human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6),^[16] later found to cause Roseola, an infantile disease.

In 1995, Gallo published his discovery that chemokines, a class of naturally occurring compounds, can block HIV and halt the progression of AIDS. This was heralded by Science magazine as one of the top scientific breakthroughs within the same year of his publication.^[17] The role chemokines play in controlling the progression of HIV infection has influenced thinking on how AIDS works against the human immune system^[18] and led to a class of drugs used to treat HIV, the chemokine antagonists or entry inhibitors.

Gallo and two longtime scientific collaborators, Robert R. Redfield and William A. Blattner, founded the Institute of Human Virology in 1996. Gallo's team at the institute maintain an ongoing program of scientific research and clinical care and treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS, treating more than 4,000 patients in Baltimore and 200,000 patients at institute-supported clinics in Africa and the Caribbean.^[19] In July 2007, Gallo and his team were awarded a $15 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for research into a preventive vaccine for HIV/AIDS.

Priority and the 2008 Nobel Prize

Assignment of priority for the discovery of HIV has been controversial and was a subplot in the 1993 American television film docudrama (and earlier book about the early history of AIDS) And the Band Played On.

Montagnier's group in France isolated HIV almost one and a half years before Gallo,^[20] while Gallo's group demonstrated that the virus causes AIDS and generated much of the science that made the discovery possible, including a technique previously developed by Gallo's lab for growing T cells in the laboratory.^[2] When Montagnier's group first published their discovery, they said HIV's role in causing AIDS "remains to be determined."^[21]

In 1989, the investigative journalist John Crewdson^[22] suggested that Gallo's lab might have misappropriated a sample of HIV isolated at the Pasteur Institute by Montagnier's group.^[23] Investigations by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the HHS ultimately cleared Gallo's group of any wrongdoing.^[21][24] As part of these investigations, the United States Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health commissioned Hoffmann–La Roche scientists to analyze archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. They concluded that the virus used in Gallo's lab had come from Montagnier's lab; it was a virus from a patient that had contaminated a virus sample from another patient. On request, Montagnier's group had sent a sample of this culture to Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses. The sample then contaminated the pooled culture on which Gallo was working.^[25] On 12th December 1985 the Institut Pasteur filed suit to challenge a patent for an HIV test that had been granted on 28th May 1985 to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).^[14] In 1987, the two governments agreed to split equally the proceeds from the patent,^[14] naming Montagnier and Gallo co-discoverers.^[21][26] Montagnier and Gallo resumed collaborating with each other again for a chronology that appeared in Nature in 1987.^[21]

In the November 29, 2002 issue of Science, Gallo and Montagnier published a series of articles, one of which was co-written by both scientists, in which they acknowledged the pivotal roles that each had played in the discovery of HIV.^[27][28][29]

In 2008, Montagnier and his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi from the Institut Pasteur were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the discovery of HIV.^[30] Harald zur Hausen also shared the Prize for his discovery that human papilloma viruses lead to cervical cancer,^[30] but Gallo was left out.^[21] Gallo said that it was "a disappointment" that he was not named a co-recipient.^[31] Montagnier said he was "surprised" Gallo was not recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo."^[21]

Profectus BioSciences Inc.

In 2005, Gallo co-founded Profectus BioSciences, Inc., a biotechnology company. Profectus develops and commercializes technologies to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by human viral diseases, including HIV.^[32]

Global Virus Network

In March 2011, Gallo and his colleagues William Hall, MD, PhD, Chair of Medical Microbiology and Director of the Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases at University College Dublin’s (UCD) School of Medicine and Medical Science in Dublin, Ireland, and Reinhard Kurth, MD, former Director of the Paul Ehrlich Institute and the Robert Koch Institute and Chairman of the Foundation Council at Ernst Schering Foundation in Berlin, Germany, co-founded the Global Virus Network (GVN). GVN fulfills the need for substantive increases in global collaboration to overcome gaps in research during the earliest phases of viral epidemics and medical training programs enhancing the numbers of rising medical virologists trained to meet these challenges.^[33]

References

Further reading

• Gallo, Robert (1991). Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer & The Human Retrovirus. A Story of Scientific Discovery. ISBN 0-465-09806-1. 
• Epstein, Steven (1996). Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. University of California Press. pp. 480 pages. ISBN 978-0-520-20233-7. 
• Crewdson, John (2002). Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo. Little, Brown & Co. pp. 670, xviii. ISBN 0-316-13476-7. 
• Shilts, Randy (2007 (revised edition)). And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 656 pages. ISBN 978-0-312-37463-1.  Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Gallo

• Combatting AIDS at Home by Dr. Robert Gallo, The Washington Post, op-ed, November 16, 2008
• AIDS at 20: A Look Back, A Look Ahead with World-Renowned Scientist Dr. Robert Gallo
• Official biography
• Discovering the Cause of AIDS, by Stanley B. Prusiner
• Robert Gallo optimistic about finding an HIV vaccine soon - A recorded Interview on IsraCast
• NIH oral History of Dr. Robert C. Gallo on AIDS research
• The Sound and Fury of HIV
• French researchers win for virus discovery; controversial scientist shunned
• Portrait, Interviews und Lectures
• Dan David Prize laureate 2009