Dr. Bill Golde, Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Bill Golde, Chief Science Officer, “retired” from the US government in 2016 and joined the Moredun Research Institute (MRI) in Edinburgh, Scotland as a senior scientist. Dr. Golde’s lab continues a research focus on development and testing of vaccines for viral diseases of livestock species. His laboratory continues to use adenovirus vectors for vaccine delivery and has become the resource for the Institute in multiple virus-based vaccine vectors including, herpesvirus, Orf virus and MVA vectors. With the additional lentivirus vector developed by a colleague at MRI, the research program is developing vaccines for the viral pathogens that cause bovine respiratory disease and for PRRSV and PCV-2 in swine, with work ongoing on foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV).
During the past 6 years, Bill has started a second, companion company to NEAH at Moredun called Pentlands Immunologics (PI). This was spurred by the need for a collection of reagents generated under a large European Union grant to be available to the research community. Further, reagents created by Moredun scientists over a number of years were not readily available. With the resources of the Moredun Group, this has allowed the NEAH/PI partnership to progress to make these important reagents widely available.
Working at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for 17 years, Bill led the immunology laboratory investigating immune responses of swine and cattle to FMDV infection at the USDA’s Foreign Animal Disease Research Unit at Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). Killed virus vaccines developed 70 years ago induce early onset of immunity and protection but show very poor duration of immunity. The Golde lab has developed new technologies to more closely track immune responses of cattle and swine and, using that information, have now designed new vaccines to broaden the immune response to FMDV and enhance duration of protection.
Before joining USDA, Dr. Golde worked on the spectrum of infectious diseases associated with the black-legged or deer tick, genus Ixodes. These include Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and babesiosis. This work was carried out analyzing patients while he was at Stony Brook University, Long Island, NY and before that in animal models at the Centers for Disease Control, Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases in Colorado.
Bill received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado in Immunology and Microbiology, working on the biology of T lymphocytes in the response to protein antigens. In the adjacent laboratory, the now Board Chair of NEAH, John Ransom, was investigating the physiology of B-cell activation. They shared a common interest in new technologies at the time, including monoclonal antibodies and flow cytometry, which continues to this day. Bill went on to learn molecular biology and virology during a postdoctoral fellowship in transcriptional control of virus gene expression at University of Colorado, Boulder and studied gene regulation in diabetes at the Barbra Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes in Denver.