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Read more about Fred Hutch achievements and accolades.
Throughout its 50-year history, Fred Hutch Cancer Center has distinguished itself as a leader in the study of viruses, cancer-causing viral infections and infectious diseases, especially during the pandemic when as many as 20% of Fred Hutch researchers had active projects related to COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it.
Two of those researchers — virologist Keith Jerome, MD, PhD, and evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom, PhD — were recently elected to the 2025 class of fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Each year, fellows of the Academy, who form an honorific leadership group within AAM, are selected by their peers based on their original contributions to microbiology and records of scientific achievement.
Jerome’s work on viruses that cause chronic, incurable infections shows that it may one day be possible to use gene therapy to cure infections like herpes simplex (HSV).
Bloom focuses on the evolution of genes and proteins to understand how genetic mutations shape the ability of fast-evolving viruses — such as the ones that cause influenza and COVID-19 — to infect and spread.
Over the years at Fred Hutch, Jerome and Bloom’s scientific ambitions have evolved from understanding the fundamental biology of viruses to harnessing that knowledge for new therapies and methods that safely model how viruses could mutate to evade vaccines.
Working to cure chronic viral infections
Jerome’s lab, in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutch, focuses on viruses that persist in their hosts and evade the immune system.
While viruses like influenza come and go, others can set up permanent homes in our cells. Viruses like herpes simplex virus (HSV), hepatitis B, HIV and (occasionally) human papillomavirus, have found different ways to stick with us.
As a co-principal investigator for defeatHIV, a National Institutes of Health Martin Delaney Collaboratory, Jerome also headed collaborative efforts to explore HIV cures. He directs the Molecular Virology Laboratory at the University of Washington, which has developed molecular diagnostic assays for viruses like HIV, hepatitis B and C, enterovirus and cytomegalovirus.
Though he began his career studying HIV and has continued to lead research focused on that virus and hepatitis B, most of Jerome’s cure work has focused on HSV. After the acute phase of infection, the virus permanently parks circular copies of its DNA in clusters of neurons. While these episomes mostly lie dormant, under the right circumstances they can “reawaken” and prompt host cells to further spread infection by spitting out new viruses.
Both HSV-1 and HSV-2 infections are very common; about two-thirds of people around the world have HSV-1. For most people, HSV’s occasional stirrings are a minor annoyance, but for some the symptoms are debilitating. In rare cases, HSV infection can cause meningitis and sometimes fatal encephalitis.
“It’s a big virus,” noted Jerome, who holds the Larry Corey Endowed Professorship in Virology at UW. “There’s a lot of genetic material so it has a lot of really interesting mechanisms for manipulating its reality [within the neuron].”
HSV has been infecting humans and our ancestors for 6 million years — plenty of time to get creative. Jerome started out trying to understand how HSV manipulates our cells, but about 15 years ago decided to move from understanding the virus to targeting it. Jerome’s inspiration came from work being performed by Fred Hutch structural biologist Barry Stoddard, PhD, on an enzyme (called a meganuclease) that could snip DNA. Stoddard’s team wanted to use the meganuclease to insert new DNA that could correct a dysfunctional gene.
But at the time, the strategy only half worked: although the enzyme would successfully target the right stretch of DNA, it would introduce new, unwanted errors.
“They were gene editing much more frequently than they were gene correcting,” Jerome recalled. “It occurred to me that if one had one of those meganucleases that targeted a virus, you could cause indels [inserted or deleted DNA “letters”] at a spot that could be really bad for a virus.”
He was right. With principal staff scientist Martine Aubert, PhD, Jerome developed a strategy to use the error-prone meganuclease to deactivate HSV DNA and dramatically reduce viral shedding. After success in mice, they are working through the preclinical studies needed prior to testing the strategy in human volunteers.
“Dr. Jerome’s work focuses on a completely new approach to solve this problem [of persistent infection with HSV],” wrote nominator Jeffrey Cohen, MD, chief of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “His work for the first time provides hope that a cure is possible for HSV and by extension for other virus infections that can establish a latent infection in their host.”
Jerome said his research evolved from understanding the fundamental biology of the virus to finding ways to target it with new therapies.
In less than two decades, “we’ve gone from taking a completely artificial, test tube-based system … to now, where we can create enzymes that target herpes simplex and eliminate almost all of it from a living animal,” Jerome said. “Hopefully, we’ll take that into a human trial reasonably soon. And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing, if we could take a virus that has been infecting us since before Lucy [a hominid who lived 3.2 million years ago] and turn that into a curable or nearly-curable disease?”
Connecting basic research to relevant questions of human health
Bloom has also found ways to apply the fundamental discoveries he has made about the evolution of viruses and proteins in the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch.
When SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, triggered a pandemic that changed the world in 2020, Bloom shifted gears to study how SARS-CoV-2 was evolving and what that evolution could mean for applied questions about antibodies and vaccines that treat and prevent infection with the virus.
“Over the time that I have been at Fred Hutch, the research remains intellectually interesting from a basic science standpoint,” Bloom said. “But particularly during the COVID pandemic, it became an increasingly applied or public health interest as well.”
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Over the last few years, Bloom and his team have figured out a safe, efficient and quick method to analyze thousands of genetic mutations in the virus and identify the changes that affect its survival — vital information that could help us make more effective vaccines and annual boosters.
“In some ways, I’m still researching what I came here to research — how viruses and proteins evolve — but I don’t think I could have predicted how much this would become intertwined with biomedical and public health questions,” Bloom said.
He appreciates the culture of collaboration among research divisions at Fred Hutch that span the entire journey between fundamental biology and the practical clinical and public health applications that arise from those discoveries.
“Being at Fred Hutch is a really great place to connect basic research to questions of real human health relevance, and that’s been one of the things that has helped my research go in that direction,” he said.
Bloom and Jerome join a distinguished roster of Fred Hutch colleagues also named AAM fellows.
“One of the fun things [about being elected] is going through the list of people who’ve been elected before you,” Jerome said. “There are many names on that list that I very, very much respect. It’s an honor to be on a list with those folks, including several here at Fred Hutch.”
Jerome and Bloom join previously elected Fred Hutch fellows including Harmit Malik, PhD, Steve Hahn, PhD, Toshi Tsukiyama, PhD, Robert Eisenman, PhD, Michael Emerman, PhD, Nina Salama, PhD, Denise Galloway, PhD, and Gerald Smith, PhD. Galloway holds the Paul Stephanus Memorial Endowed Chair and Salama holds the Dr. Penny E. Petersen Memorial Chair for Lymphoma Research.
