Arturo Casadevall

Arturo Casadevall was born in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba in 1957. He moved to Elmhurst, Queens, New York City in 1968 and became a U.S. citizen in 1976. Casadevall received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry from Queens College, City University of New York in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D in Biochemistry from New York University in 1983 and 1984.[3] He then received his M.D. from New York University in 1985. Casadevall completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the Bellevue Hospital Center, and a fellowship in infectious diseases at the Montefiore Medical Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Under the guidance of Matthew D. Scharff, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cell biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1989–1991.[4]

In 1992, he accepted an assistant professorship in medicine and microbiology & immunology at Albert Einstein. In 2000, he became the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Montefiore Medical Center and rose to the rank of full professor by 2001.[4] In 2002, he was named the Selma and Jacques Mitrani Professor in Biomedical Research. In 2006, he became the Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and was named the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Professor of Microbiology Immunology. He is board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in the subspecialty of infectious diseases until 2023.

Until July 2009, Dr. Casadevall served as an editor of the ASM journal Infection and Immunity and continues to serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the Journal of Experimental Medicine.[3] He is also the founding Editor in Chief of mBio, the first open access general journal of the American Society for Microbiology.[4] He served as a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity from 2005 to 2014. Casadevall was also a commissioner for the National Forensic Commission of the United States Department of Justice from 2015–2017.[5]

In March 2015, Casadevall was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching.[6][7] The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship program was established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg.[8][9] Casadevall holds appointments in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Department of Infectious Diseases.[10][11] He also serves as the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2015. Casadevall is passionate about improving the doctoral curriculum, stating that he wants to “to develop a program of putting the 'Ph' [philosophy] back into 'PhD’ [...] Hopkins reformed medical education 100 years ago, and now we can experiment with creating better ways of training scientists.”[11]

Bridging the fields of microbiology and immunology, Casadevall's research is focused on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He has defined much of what is known about fungal pathogenesis and how fungi such as Cryptococcus neoformans evade the host immune response.[16] Fungal infections are particularly dangerous in immunocompromised individuals such as cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, making this work highly significant. With his collaborator Dr. Ekaterina (Kate) Dadachova, he pioneered the use of radioimmunotherapeutic strategies for the control of systemic fungal and other infections. During the course of his studies, he noted that certain fungi were radioresistant and worked to develop novel therapeutic strategies for a variety of human diseases including melanoma and infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis. He holds several active patents on these approaches.

Casadevall has a long record of outstanding scholarly and leadership contributions. His lab has studied host-microbe interactions with Cryptococcus neoformans, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Bacillus anthracis, with a focus on microbial pathogenesis and mechanisms of antibody action. His lab established that humoral immunity could protect against intracellular pathogens, demonstrated that Cryptococcus neoformans was a facultative intracellular pathogen, and suggested that virulence in environmental fungi was selected by amoeba predators, a hypothesis dubbed "accidental virulence".[17] Jointly with British biologist Robin May,[18] his group were the first to observe non-lytic expulsion, or vomocytosis, of intracellular fungi.[19] Subsequently, with Kirsten Nielsen[20] at the University of Minnesota, he characterized the ability of cryptococci to form "giant" or "titan" cells in vivo,[21] unusually large cells that help drive persistent infections. His lab continues to work on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis.

Together with Liise-anne Pirofski, he proposed the ‘Damage-Response Framework’ of microbial pathogenesis, a new synthesis that shifted the emphasis away from focusing on microbes as pathogens, commensals, opportunists to the outcome of host-pathogen interactions.[22][23][24][25] The damage-response framework was the first theory of microbial pathogenesis to incorporate the contributions of both the host and the pathogen and refocused attention into the outcome of the interaction. From the view of the damage-response framework there are no pathogens, commensals, symbionts, etc., but only microbes and their hosts, which interact to produce the states of pathogenesis, commensalism, symbiosis, indifference, etc.[26]

Dr. Arturo Casadevall speaking about "Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the Research of Health and Medicine" at the Osler Medical Symposium, held at Johns Hopkins University.

In addition, Casadevall, in collaboration with Dr. Ferric C. Fang, has been constructive shaping the nations approach to science, scientific misconduct,[27][28] and promotion of women and underrepresented minorities.[29][30] Among his own trainees, nearly half are members of underrepresented minority groups and more than half are women.[12] With a focus on American Society for Microbiology events, Casadevall has been active in creating gender balance among speakers at conferences.[31][32] Along these lines, he stated: "When you have an underrepresentation of women as speakers and many panel discussions made up only of male researchers, you're sending the message that perhaps the field is not welcoming to women. That isn't the message we want to send."[33] His research on scientific misconduct has focused on fraudulent results published in journals and the subsequent rates of retraction.[34] In addition, his views on and analysis of topics ranging from problems with the funding pipeline to the rise in retractions in journals to the complex ethics of dual use research are widely sought by premier journals[35] and media outlets.[36]

In response to the Coronavirus disease 2019, Casadevall investigated the use of antibody-containing blood serum from patients who have recovered from the virus as a measure to help until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available.[37] These antibodies are produced as part of the body's natural immune response, and bind to and neutralize the virus. A transfusion of blood containing these antibodies boosts the immunity of newly infected patients or people at risk of contracting the disease.[38] Such infusions have been successfully implemented in past outbreaks, such as the SARS Epidemic, 1918 Flu Pandemic, and an outbreak of measles in 1934.[39][40]

He has published more than 746 papers and 33 book chapters, largely in the fields of immunology and microbiology, genetics and molecular biology, biochemistry, and medicine, and more recently scientific culture and competition. Casadevall has more than 46,000 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 113.[41]

Books

• 2011, Cryptococcus: from human pathogen to model yeast. with co-editors J. Heitman, T.R. Kozel, KJ Kwon-Chung, and JR Perfect, ASM Press.
• 1998, Cryptococcus neoformans. with co-author John R. Perfect, ASM Press.

Highly Cited Articles[41]

• 2012, with JM Bardeen, JR Bond, and N Kaiser, Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 109, nº 42; 17028–17033.
• 2003, with Joshua D Nosanchuk. The contribution of melanin to microbial pathogenesis , in: Cellular Microbiology. Vol. 5, nº 4; 203–223.
• 2002, with John R Perfect. Cryptococcosis, in: Infectious disease clinics of North America. Vol. 16, nº 4; 837–874.
• 2001, with JN Steenbergen and HA Shuman. Cryptococcus neoformans interactions with amoebae suggest an explanation for its virulence and intracellular pathogenic strategy in macrophages, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 98, nº 26; 15245–15250.
• 2000, with Gary M Cox, Jean Mukherjee, Garry T Cole, and John R Perfect. Urease as a virulence factor in experimental cryptococcosis, in: Infection and Immunity. Vol. 68, nº 2; 443–448.
• 1999, with Sarah P Franzot and Ira F Salkin. Cryptococcus neoformans var. grubii: separate varietal status for Cryptococcus neoformans serotype A isolates, in: Journal of Clinical Microbiology. Vol. 37, nº 3; 838–840.
• 1999, with Liise-anne Pirofski, Host-pathogen interactions: redefining the basic concepts of virulence and pathogenicity , in: Infection and Immunity. Vol. 67, nº 8; 3703–3713.

• mBio Founding Editor in Chief
• Faculty Webpage
• "Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the Research of Health and Medicine" Johns Hopkins News-Letter coverage of the Osler Medical Symposium

• mBio
• Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Pathogen
• Setosphaeria rostrata
• Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships
• Infectious medicine