Janet K Yamamoto, PhD

Dr. Yamamoto has been working in the HIV-1 field since 1984 and is the co-discoverer of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV, feline counterpart of HIV) and the inventor of the first commercial FIV vaccine (Fel-O-Vax® FIV, sold by Pfizer and Boehringer). Under the leadership of Dr. Murray Gardner (director of CFAR) in 1984, she set up the first HIV-1 laboratory at the University of California, Davis (UCD) which later became the main laboratory of the NIH-funded Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at UCD. She is the first to publish together with Drs. Francois Barré-Sinousi (Nobelauriate) and Gardner that IFNα and IFNβ suppresses HIV-1 replication but IFNγ enhances HIV-1 replication. Based on her experience in large-scale production of HIV-1 viruses and HIV-1 immunoblots, she also served as the consultant on the second FDA-approved HIV-1 immunoblot by Bio-Rad Laboratories. She has extensive experience in adjuvants for protein vaccines including cytokine (IL12, IL15, IL18, IFNγ) supplement of adjuvants in cats. After the discovery of FIV, her laboratory has focused on the development of FIV vaccine for both prophylaxis and therapeutic uses and FIV infection of cats as the natural small animal model of HIV/AIDS. Her laboratory has been studying the immune mechanism(s) of the protection conferred by prototype and commercial dual-subtype FIV vaccines as an animal model for developing HIV-1 vaccine. Her laboratory has discovered that vaccine-induced T-cell immunity may be more important in prophylactic protection against both homologous-subtype and heterologous-subtype FIV than vaccine-induce antibody immunity. Based on this finding, her laboratory is developing a second-generation FIV vaccine which has no conflict with commercial FIV diagnostics. Her laboratory is also working on identifying T-cell epitopes on HIV for an effective HIV vaccine for prophylaxis and therapy. Yamamoto has had NIH grant for 30 years and the majority of 90 journal/book publications and 32 patent publications are on FIV or HIV-1.