Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show Dr. Stephen Johnston, PhD - Calviri - Cancer Eradication Via A Universal Preventative Cancer Vaccine
Dr. Stephen Johnston, Ph.D. (https://biodesign.asu.edu/stephen-johnston) is the Director for the Center for Innovations in Medicine, a Professor in the School of Life Sciences, and Director of the Biological Design Graduate Program at The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Dr Johnston is also Founding CEO and Chairman of the Board Of Directors of Calviri (https://calviri.com/). The Center for Innovations in Medicine and Dr. Johnston's current work focuses on innovative solutions to fundamental problems in bio-medicine, and their organization brings together a unique group of interdisciplinary scientists to identify, analyze, and come up with inventive solutions for significant un-met medical needs. Current major translational sciences and technology development projects of Dr. Johnston include 1) Cancer Eradication: with a focus on developing a universal, preventative cancer vaccine, and 2) Health Futures: with an aim of producing a diagnostic system that allows continuous monitoring of the health status of healthy people - helping in the revolution to pre-symptomatic medicine. Dr. Johnston has broad experience in basic science, including cloning the Gal4 gene, showing that proteins have separable functional domains, and discovering the ATPases Associated proteins and their role in transcription. He was also co-inventor/innovator of pathogen derived resistance, organelle transformation, the gene gun, genetic immunization, Tobacco Etch Virus protease system, expression library immunization, linear expression elements, synbodies and immunosignaturing. Dr. Johnston is author of over 150 journal articles, has over 20 patents, and has garnered approximately $85M in grant support including large programs from DARPA, NIAID and NHLBI. Dr. Johnston has a B.S. in Molecular Biology and Ph.D. in Genetics and Plant Genetics/Plant Breeding, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did Postdoctoral work in Biochemistry at Penn State University Medical Center.