Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS and one of the world’s most celebrated cancer researchers, has stepped down as director of the Institute of Human Virology that he established in downtown Baltimore 27 years ago.
But it’s not like the 86-year-old virologist is retiring.
“I’m energetic, healthy, happy and ready for another phase,” Gallo said Monday, having informed colleagues that he is now emeritus director of the IHV at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and science adviser to the dean. He will also continue as a professor and monitor virus outbreaks around the world through the Global Virus Network, another institution that Gallo helped to establish.
Dr. Shyam Kottilil, director of clinical care and research at the IHV, will serve as acting director while officials of the institute and the medical school search for a new director.
“It is a time in my career,” Gallo said, “that I am more than happy to turn over administrative reigns and hone my attention on science — in particular, on concepts related to the origins of some human cancers, and on a fuller understanding of how HIV causes disease, focusing on an attempt to reach a functional cure where patients no longer need therapy.”
While based at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, Gallo and his team discovered the human retrovirus that causes a form of leukemia. That was a major breakthrough and, Gallo told Voice of America in 2008, the most personally satisfying of his career. When he was a boy in Connecticut, Gallo’s 6-year-old sister died of leukemia, a tragic event that sparked an interest in medical research that has lasted a lifetime.
During his NIH days, Gallo’s subsequent research helped unlock the mystery of the virus that causes AIDS, a disease that has caused more than 700,000 deaths in the U.S. and more than 40 million worldwide.
Gallo is also credited with developing the screening test for AIDS that has been used since 1984 to diagnose patients and ensure a safe blood supply. He twice received the prestigious Lasker Award for biomedical research.
In the 1990s, political and academic leaders recruited him to bring his work to the University of Maryland Baltimore.
With funds from the city and state, Gallo cofounded the IHV in 1996 with Dr. Robert Redfield, who had been head of cancer research at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Dr. William Blattner, formerly senior epidemiologist at NIH and an AIDS researcher.
The institute described itself as “the first center in the United States, perhaps the world, to combine the disciplines of basic science, epidemiology and clinical research in a concerted effort under one roof to speed the discovery of diagnostics and therapeutics for a wide variety of chronic and deadly viral and immune disorders.”
The initial focus of the institute, located in a converted warehouse on East Lombard Street, was HIV and AIDS. But Gallo believed the mission would expand to include “tumor viruses, leukemia viruses, hepatitis and its role in cancer, and the papilloma virus and its role in cancer.”
Gallo estimates that the IHV has conducted about $1.5 billion in research since its founding.
Some of that funding came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for clinical trials toward an AIDS vaccine.
Over the years, and through the pandemic, the institute treated thousands of patients in the Baltimore region, sometimes with therapies developed in its labs. In addition, the institute has treated more than 2 million patients in African and Caribbean nations. “We took care of a lot of people with hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV, drug addiction,” Gallo says. “That is the purpose of a place like this — not just to be competitive scientists, but to go to the bedside.”
Gallo, meanwhile, helped establish the GVN, a constellation of 71 research centers in 41 countries that shares information about viral diseases and outbreaks. “The GVN is huge,” says Gallo, who chairs the network’s scientific leadership board. “I will spend more time on that now.”
The GVN is not tied to any government, and it is focused on sound science and shared research. The coronavirus pandemic, Gallo said, demonstrated that the world needs a system free of politics and primed to quickly warn nations about new threats as if “the bad Martians are coming.”
The GVN, Gallo once suggested, could serve as the World Health Organization’s virology arm, sharing research, providing strategies for mitigating and controlling viruses, developing drugs and vaccines against them, and training more virologists for the future.
“The world has to be linked in a pandemic,” Gallo said. “We need to be working together. That was not the case [in 2020], nor was there an effort to make it the case. It takes much more when you’re facing a pandemic. You can’t do this alone.”
Gallo, who has written more than 1,300 scientific articles, just co-authored a new essay in the New England Journal of Medicine on polio’s detection in New York and London and what needs to be done to eradicate the virus.
The fact that polio has shown up in places where it has not been seen in decades supports a point Gallo frequently makes: Every 25 to 30 years, a gap occurs in the study of viruses; without constant vigilance, and new virologists replacing the veterans in lab coats, the results can be devastating.
That’s probably why he’s not retiring.
