Leor Weinberger

Leor S. Weinberger is an American virologist and quantitative biologist. He is credited with discovering the HIV virus latency circuit, and providing the first experimental evidence that stochastic gene expression fluctuations ('noise') drive cell fate decisions. He has also pioneered the concept of therapeutic interfering particles, or "TIPs", which are resistance-proof antivirals. His TED talk on this novel antiviral approach, 20 years in the making, has been called a "highlight" of TED and received a standing ovation from the live audience. Weinberger was profiled in The New York Times by Carl Zimmer, in Science magazine and in Le Monde. He was previously the William and Ute Bowes Distinguished Professor of Virology, director of the Gladstone Center for Cell Circuitry, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Education and career Weinberger received his undergraduate degree in biophysics from University of Maryland, College Park in 1998. He completed his PhD in Biophysics, with a focus on HIV, from University of California, Berkeley in 2004. He received postdoctoral training at Princeton University as a Lewis Thomas Fellow, working with Thomas Shenk and David Botstein.

Major discoveries Weinberger and his lab have been credited with the discovery of HIV's intrinsic decision circuit. The lab has since been able to identify similar stochastic processes in other viruses, such as a kind of herpesvirus called human cytomegalovirus, as published in a 2020 paper. Weinberger and his lab are looking for ways to target the latency reservoir of viruses as a form of treatment.

Weinberger's work has been referred to as "part of what some scientists are calling a 'renaissance' in viral therapy" by the San Francisco Chronicle. According to Wired, Weinberger has pioneered research to combat HIV by creating "therapeutic interfering particles" or "TIPs". Weinberger first began testing this concept when he was in graduate school at Berkeley studying the biophysics of HIV. As described on Weinberger's lab website and in a pre-print research article, TIPs are engineered deletion mutants designed to piggyback on a virus and deprive the virus of replication material, thus reducing viral load. TIPs replicate and co-evolve with a virus, making it a treatment that solves what Weinberger has called a "fundamental mismatch" between viruses and treatment: viruses evolve, vaccines do not. TIPs also have the capacity to transmit along viral transmission routes, harnessing the power of virus "super spreaders" and transmitting the treatment to resource-limited and remote populations like communities in South Africa.

Awards and honors

Weinberger holds numerous patents for inventing novel antiviral medicines. Weinberger was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2008, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2011, and a Keck Awardee. He served on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Innovation review panel, and his research has been widely published in Science, Nature, and Cell. He is a public supporter of open science collaboration and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, where his writings have launched international programs.