Timothy M. Block, Ph.D.
Dr. Block is the founder and volunteer President and Director for the Institute for Hepatitis and Virus Research, and the Hepatitis B Foundation as well as serving in the capacity of Director, Drexel Institute for Biotechnology and Virology Research; and Professor, Microbiology and Immunology, Drexel University College of Medicine. In 1991, Dr. Block helped establish the Hepatitis B Foundation, which is the only nonprofit organization solely dedicated to the cause of hepatitis B. The Foundation's public advocacy initiative has resulted in raising awareness of the problem of hepatitis B around the globe, and is highlighted in the introduction of laws in the United States requiring hepatitis B vaccination of school children, most notably Act 15 in Pennsylvania, his home state. Dr. Block serves on National Institutes of Health study sections and has been a coordinator of several national and international meetings focusing on hepatitis. He is author of more than 100 scholarly publications, an elected Fellow, International Union Against Cancer; Member, Bulgarian National Academy of Science and Medicine, elected Fellow, The Glycobiology Institute, University of Oxford; and has received many awards to perform research from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Block holds several patents that have resulted in licensed technologies in the area of viral therapeutics and cancer detection.

Francis V. Chisari, M.D.
Dr. Chisari serves as Professor of Virology and Head of the Division of Experimental Pathology, Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He is well known for his work on hepatitis B and C virus infections and carcinogenesis. Dr. Chisari is widely recognized for the development of transgenic mouse models of hepatitis B virus infection, for a series of discoveries that defined the immunological basis for HBV clearance, persistence and pathogenesis, and for establishing the rationale for the development of therapeutic immunization for these chronic infections. He and his colleagues recently developed a robust cell culture model of hepatitis C virus invection that opens up the entire life cycle of HCV to discovery, and they have used RNA interference to suppress the replication of both of these viruses in cell culture and in experimental animals. He has written over 300 papers on these subjects and has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Mark A. Kay, M.D. Ph.D.
Dr. Kay is the Director of the Program in Human Gene Therapy and the Dennis Farrey Family Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Genetics at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in Developmental Genetics, and M.D. from Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. His clinical residency/fellowships were in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics, and Biochemical Inborn Errors of Metabolism, as well as post-doctoral research training at Baylor College of Medicine. Prior to his move to Stanford in 1998, Dr. Kay was at the University of Washington as Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine, with adjuncts in Pediatrics, Biochemistry and Pathology. Dr. Kay has received several awards for his pioneering work in gene therapy and hemophilia. Dr. Kay was on the founding board of directors of the American Society for Gene Therapy and served as the Society's President in 2005-2006. Dr. Kay's research has led to over 150 scientific publications in various leading journals. He currently is responsible for a laboratory consisting of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and other research personnel. The focus of the laboratory is to establish the scientific principles required for hepatic gene therapy for the treatment of genetic and acquired diseases. His group has performed two Phase I/II gene therapy trials for treating hemophilia B. His laboratory’s pioneering demonstration of RNAi activity in whole non-embryonic mammals, and RNAi-mediated inhibition of viral hepatitis B replication in animals are major milestones in RNAi research. His work continues on defining clinically-relevant gene therapy approaches, researching RNAi-based therapies and establishing some of the molecular limits of expressed RNAi in vivo.

Martin Rosenberg, Ph.D.
Dr. Rosenberg currently serves as the Vice President, Research & Development for Promega Corporation. In June 2001, Dr. Martin Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Anti-Infectives in Drug Discovery for GlaxoSmithKline, retired from his position and joined Promega Corporation. Dr. Rosenberg presently holds Adjunct Professorships in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Microbiology at the University Of Pennsylvania, and the Department of Biochemistry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Dr. Rosenberg is Editor of "Current Opinion in Biotechnology", a section editor for Journal of Bacteriology, servers on the Editorial Boards of a variety of other international scientific journals. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Promega Corporation, Elitra Pharmaceuticals and AnaMax. Dr. Rosenberg currently serves as a Member of the FDA Science Board and has also served as a member of the Executive Council for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Rosenberg has published more than 200 articles, is a named inventor of over fifty issued patents and receives numerous invitations to lecture both nationally and internationally.

John M. Taylor, Ph.D.
Dr. Taylor is currently a Senior Member at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A long-term theme of his research is the molecular biology of animal viruses. He has experience with retroviruses, hepadnaviruses, as well as herpes and influenza viruses. Currently, Dr. Taylor is working with hepatitis delta virus (HDV), an infectious agent found in nature only in association with hepatitis B virus (HBV). Dr. Taylor's efforts are directed towards understanding the structure and replication of HDV, and the nature of its interactions with HBV. In many parts of the world, co-infection of HBV and HDV contribute to a more rapid progression of liver damage from hepatitis and liver disease.

Stephen Udem, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Stephen Udem currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Vaccine Development and Chief Scientific Officer for the International Aids Vaccine Initiative ("IAVI") where he manages the IAVI's vaccine development programs and also provides strategic leadership across all scientific programs. Prior to joining the IAVI, Dr. Udem held senior research and development positions in Wyeth's vaccine division. He is an internationally recognized virologist and vaccinologist, considered especially expert in the fields of negative-strand RNA viruses and the design and development of viral vectors. While his focus at Wyeth was Vaccine Discovery Research for which he led a department of 150 researchers, his activities and responsibilities were far broader and included vaccine candidate development, regulatory submission, intellectual property assessment, and occasionally product licensure. Prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Udem held senior academic positions at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the New Jersey Medical School. His scientific efforts in academia as well as in industry have been supported by extramural grants and contracts, and his teaching talent has been repeatedly recognized in awards and honors. In addition, Dr. Udem's contributions have been extensively published in the scientific literature and many of his creative technology inventions have been patented. He received his undergraduate degree from City College of New York and his Ph.D. and M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Jack R. Wands, M.D.
Dr. Wands currently holds the following positions at Brown Medical School Rhode Island Hospital; the Jeffrey and Kimberly Greenberg - Artemis and Martha Joukowsky Professor of Medical Science in Gastroenterology, Professor of Medical Science and Director Brown Medical School, Liver Research Center, Rhode Island Hospital. Dr. Brown's research has been geared toward understanding the role of hepatitis B and C infection in the pathogenesis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) at the molecular level. Through his role at the Liver Research Center, Dr. Wands sponsors ongoing research directed toward the development of antiviral strategies. Dr. Wands has also authored numerous articles and publications on HCC, HBV and HCV and is actively engaged in preclinical and clinical research related to HBV and HCV.

David B. Weiner, Ph.D.
Dr. David Weiner is Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Chair of the Gene Therapy and Vaccines Graduate Program, at the University of Pennsylvania. During his career he has worked extensively in the areas of molecular immunology, viral pathogenesis, the development of vaccines and cutting edge molecular approaches for infectious diseases. His laboratory is considered one of the founders of the field of DNA vaccines as his group not only was the first to report on the use of this technology for vaccines against HIV, it was the first group to advance DNA vaccine technology to clinical evaluation. Dr. Weiner's group is also a leading laboratory in the area of viral pathogenesis. His group discovered the first role for the HIV accessory gene vpr in the viral life cycle and has contributed important papers to this area. Dr. Weiner has authored over 270 articles in peer reviewed journals and has edited seven books and special focused volumes. Dr. Weiner serves on national and international review boards and panels and maintains an active peer reviewed funded program. He also has helped to advance technology development by serving in an advisory capacity to several Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Companies. He has organized dozens of meetings and workshops and is an active speaker at national and international meetings.

James R. Williamson, Ph.D.
Dr. James R. Williamson is a Professor in the Departments of Molecular Biology and Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Williamson received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1988, and following postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado, he joined the faculty in the Chemistry Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, where he attained the rank of Associate Professor with tenure, in 1997. Dr. Williamson moved to The Scripps Research Institute in 1998. Dr. Williamson founded Cassia, LLC in 2004. Dr. Williamson's research involves the study of RNA structure and RNA-protein interactions using biochemistry and structural biology approaches.