Dr. Grant McFadden received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1975, from McGill University. He has held previous tenured faculty positions at the University of Alberta, Western University, and the University of Florida and was a visiting sabbatical Professor at Harvard Medical School. He was awarded a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Molecular Virology in 2001 and in 2005 he was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholarship. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2005 and the American Academy of Microbiology in 2007. Dr. McFadden is currently a Professor at Arizona State University and is the Director of the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines, and Virotherapy (BCIVV). He was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal PLoS Pathogens until 2020, is currently a Senior Editor at Molecular Therapy-Oncolytics, and was the President of the American Society for Virology 2015-16. Dr. McFadden's lab pioneered the field of viral immune subversion (also called "anti-immunology") and is credited with the discovery of a wide spectrum of virus-derived inhibitors of the immune system. His lab also investigates host-virus tropism, and the deployment of poxviruses for oncolytic virotherapy for the treatment of cancer, particularly with a rabbit-specific poxvirus called myxoma virus (MYXV). He is also currently developing human clinical trials that exploit virotherapy with MYXV to treat various cancers, for which he has co-founded in 2019 a new biotech company called OncoMyx Therapeutics, currently located at the Wexford Building in downtown Phoenix. To date, McFadden has published over 390 scientific papers and reviews.
Education
B.Sc. Biochemistry (honors), McGill University 1970
The McFadden lab studies how poxviruses that cause immunosuppression interact with the host immune system, with specific focus on virus tropism, virus-encoded immune inhibitors, and the deployment of specific poxviruses for oncolytic virotherapy to treat cancer. He is currently developing human clinical trials to exploit virotherapy with one specific poxvirus, myxoma virus, to treat various cancers in collaboration with a new ASU spinoff biotech company called OncoMyx Therapeutics (based in Phoenix). His lab also studies how virus delivery to disseminated cancer can be facilitated by utilizing migratory immune cell types as carrier cells to ferry the oncolytic virus to sites of metastatic disease.
Research Group
Dr. McFadden is the Director of the ASU Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines and Virotherapy (BCIVV)