After years of persistence, TEDMED 2020 Speaker Leor Weinberger created a viral therapy that has the potential to stop the next pandemic. Watch Leor’s TEDMED 2020 Talk “Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?” to hear how he created a dynamic therapy for viral outbreaks, which can fundamentally change future of health and medicine.

This Week’s TEDMED Talk

Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?

Leor Weinberger, Virologist

In early days of his career, Virologist Leor Weinbergernoticed a fundamental mismatch in the creation of viral therapies. While viruses are dynamic, therapies were static. He spent the next 20 years pursuing a radical question: Can a therapy mutate and transmit just as a virus does? He chased this idea wholeheartedly, in a quest for a dynamic therapy for HIV. In doing so, he created a “hijacker therapy” which allows a vaccine hijacker cell to protect cells from HIV. This would not only stop the spread of HIV, but could change the future of viral outbreaks.

Leor persevered to create a vaccine for HIV that effectively mimics the properties of a virus itself. To learn how this discovery could stop the next viral pandemic, watch Leor’s Talk, “Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?” now on TEDMED.com.

Watch more groundbreaking Talks from TEDMED 2020 now on TEDMED.com.

Best,
The TEDMED Team

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