Paula Cannon, Ph.D.,is a Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, where she leads a research team that studies viruses, stem cells and gene therapy. She obtained her PhD from the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, and received postdoctoral training at both Oxford and Harvard universities. Her research uses gene editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9, to develop treatments for infectious and genetic diseases of the blood and immune systems. In 2010, her team was the first to show that gene editing could be used to mimic a natural mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents HIV infection, and which has now progressed to a clinical trial in HIV-positive individuals.
