Dr. Malley was a panelist for the Forum’s discussions on Trust in Vaccines and Vaccinating Children.
Rick Malley, M.D. received his early education at Ecole Active Bilingue in Paris France, then a B.A. from Yale University, M.D. from Tufts University in 1990, and pediatric infectious diseases and emergency medicine training at Boston Children’s Hospital. In 1997, a chance meeting with Dr. Porter Anderson (one of the co-inventors of the Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate vaccine) led to his interest in the development of a species-specific pneumococcal vaccine for use in developing countries and vaccinology in general. Under Dr. Anderson’s mentorship, he shifted his research to the development of novel vaccines against pneumococcus and other pathogens, leading to numerous scientific publications describing various aspects of pneumococcal pathogenesis and prevention, such as acquired and innate immunity, correlates of protection, and mechanisms of protection from nasopharyngeal colonization.
Dr. Malley is the Kenneth McIntosh Chair in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Malley regularly attends on the Pediatric Infectious Diseases service at Boston Children’s Hospital, providing consultation on inpatients.
Dr. Malley runs a research laboratory with past and present funding from the Meningitis Research Foundation, NIH, PATH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), focusing on vaccine development for pneumococcus, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella typhi and paratyphi, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis and more recently SARS-CoV-2. In collaboration with PATH and the BMGF, Dr. Malley led an international effort for the development of a pneumococcal vaccine for developing countries. In 2014, Dr. Malley and collaborators started Affinivax, a biotechnology company seed-funded by BMGF and based on a novel technology called MAPS (Multiple Antigen Presenting System) to develop vaccines for developing countries. Streptococcus pneumoniae is the lead target being developed at Affinivax, along with other vaccines (including against nosocomial infections, Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile and more recently against Covid-19). A pneumococcal MAPS vaccine has recently completed Phase 2 clinical testing in older adults and is headed towards Phase 3 trials.
