Leor S. Weinberger, Ph.D.

There is a big, global problem: viruses such as HIV and COVID-19 mutate, but treatments for them don’t.

For more than 20 years, Leor Weinberger, PhD, has been thinking about how to make vaccines work more efficiently by being adaptive, rather than static.

“We’re fighting biology with chemistry,” said Weinberger, director of the Gladstone Center for Cell Circuitry and a professor in the Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC San Francisco. “Biology is dynamic, so it evolves. It transmits. Chemistry does neither of those things. It’s static… Continue reading.

When investors hedge a bet, they divvy their money between risky investments, which might make a large profit, and safe investments, which help ensure that not everything is lost in a market crash. The herpesvirus cytomegalovirus, Gladstone researchers have discovered, takes a similar approach to infecting the human body.

Cytomegalovirus is a common virus in the same family as herpes simplex, chickenpox, and mononucleosis. More than half of all people become infected with cytomegalovirus during their lifetime. When it infects, the virus often enters a dormant state, ensuring lifelong infection. However, in some the virus emerges from dormancy; for example in babies and in transplant recipients, and it causes serious problems and even death. Indeed, cytomegalovirus is the leading cause of birth defects and the leading cause of transplant failures… Continue reading.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the pending induction of Leor S. Weinberger, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco; Associate Investigator (Virology and Immunology), Gladstone Institutes, Biochemistry and Biophysics/Virology and Immunology, University of California, San Francisco; Gladstone Institutes, to its College of Fellows. Dr. Weinberger was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows For contributions in establishing the field of synthetic virology and for pioneering a new spectrum of antiviral therapeutics.