Meet Cancer Center Member Steven Zeichner, MD, PhD

The Cancer Center recently welcomed Steven Zeichner, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics and Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology, to its Cancer Therapeutics Program.

Dr. Zeichner focuses on the pathogenesis of infectious diseases and developing new therapies and vaccines for infectious diseases and cancers. His lab is pioneering a new, rapid, low-cost synthetic biology-enabled vaccine platform, Killed Whole Cell (KWC) Genome-Reduced Bacteria (GRB), in which vaccine immunogens are expressed on the surfaces of the bacteria to produce a new, testable vaccine in less than three weeks from target selection, making it useful for both infectious diseases and custom cancer immunotherapeutics. The benchmark cost of a KWC vaccine is less than $1 per dose, and factories producing KWC vaccines already exist worldwide, including in low-income countries. Dr. Zeichner is currently collaborating with Lawrence Lum, MD, DSc, Professor of Hematology and Oncology, on using the KWC/GRB platform to develop new therapeutic cancer vaccines and is eager to collaborate with other UVACCC members.

In the spring of 2023, Dr. Zeichner was awarded a $2.7 million NIH R01 grant, “Globally Appropriate Genome Reduced Killed Whole Bacteria HIV Vaccines,” to support the development of a novel prophylactic HIV vaccine using this platform.

Dr. Zeichner earned his MD and PhD in Microbiology from the University of Chicago as a student in the Medical Scientist Training Program and subsequently trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

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