FEATURING DR. GAVIN CLOHERTY – MAY 12, 2021 – “ABBOTT PANDEMIC DEFENSE COALITION – LEGACY AND FUTURE OF ABBOTT INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH.”

Gavin Cloherty received his bachelors and doctoral degrees in microbiology from the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is currently Head of Infectious Disease Research at Abbott and a Research Fellow in Abbott’s Volwiler Society. He has worked in Abbott for 20 years in various roles, thirteen of which have been spent in research roles where he provided scientific leadership in infectious disease and diagnostics. His research over the past twenty years has focused on the development and application of diagnostic tools for HIV and viral hepatitis, including the development of the FDA approved RealTime HIV-1 viral load assay or the development of a novel HBV pre-genomic HBV RNA assay and the studies to understand their performance, clinical utilities and empower drug development.

Recently his research interests have included the development of robust scalable techniques for the identification and characterization of unknown pathogens using a metagenomics approach, combining unbiased next-generation sequencing with robust bioinformatic pipelines, we can catalog all known pathogens (viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites) in a specimen and predict the presence of highly divergent viruses for both acute and chronic illnesses that are otherwise undetectable with conventional molecular methods including the ones employed in Abbott’s identification for a novel pegivirus (HPgV-2) which appears to be associated with HCV infection. Similar efforts through the Abbotts Global Viral Surveillance Program in studies of HIV and hepatitis strains worldwide to monitor changes in circulating strains and emergence of new strains, to identify and characterize rare HIV strains such as HIV-1 groups N, O and P, to identify unusual hepatitis E recombinant strains (wild boar/rabbit) in humans, to uncover unexpectedly high prevalence of hepatitis Delta in countries such as Cameroon, and identify strains of the newly discovered HPgV-2 in samples from around the world.