Thomas N. Denny, MSc, M.Phil, is the Chief Operating Officer of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) and the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), and a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. He is also an Affiliate Member of the Duke Global Health Institute. He has recently been appointed to the Duke University Fuqua School of Business Health Sector Advisory Council. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Pathology, Laboratory Medicine and Pediatrics, Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and Community Health and Assistant Dean for Research in Health Policy at the New Jersey Medical School, Newark, New Jersey. He has served on numerous committees for the NIH over the last two decades and currently is the principal investigator of an NIH portfolio in excess of 56 million dollars. Mr. Denny was a 2002-2003 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (IOM). As a fellow, he served on the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with legislation/policy responsibilities in global AIDS, bioterrorism, clinical trials/human subject protection and vaccine related-issues.
“Traditional vaccines require that you develop that immunogen you get that growing in cell culture in a laboratory and grow it in very large numbers and then have to purify it and then get that to the point of what we call phase I material to try it in the human clinical trial.â€
- News Live Expert Panel for May 14, 2020: Vaccine and Treatment Leaders for COVID-19
“One of the approaches that we’re pursuing is actually to develop a pan corona type vaccine and if you think of a tree and the branches and the leaves, if you're making a vaccine to the novel coronavirus that we’re dealing with now, you add on a branch or few leaves, but if you can make a vaccine that takes care of the trunk if you will – the gene - a whole family of coronaviruses there then one would prevent these types of pandemics at least from a coronavirus in the future.â€
- News Live Expert Panel for May 14, 2020: Vaccine and Treatment Leaders for COVID-19