Steve Reed has spent his career chasing vaccines for diseases that rarely make headlines. He took his doctorate at the University of Montana in 1979, in microbiology and immunology, and went straight to Manaus, Brazil, to lead tropical disease research at the National Institute of Amazon Research.
Today he is CEO and co-founder of HDT Bio, a Seattle company he is steering toward cancer treatments built on RNA.
A long road to Seattle
The company’s biography of Reed traces the path. In 1980 he became an assistant professor of medicine at Cornell, still working in Brazil. Seattle came next, in 1984, at the Biomedical Research Institute there. In 1993 he founded IDRI, the Infectious Disease Research Institute, and held a series of roles there until 2019.
Along the way came more companies. He co-founded Corixa Corporation in 1994 and was its chief scientific officer until 2004; GlaxoSmithKline later bought it. In 2008 he founded Immune Design Corp., a cancer therapeutics company, alongside Rick Klausner, David Baltimore and Ralph Steinman, and ran it as CEO until 2011. Afrigen Biologics in Cape Town followed in 2014, where he was a director until 2019.
The scientific record is long. Working with GSK, he led the group that produced the first defined tuberculosis vaccine, which is still advancing through late clinical development. He also built the first defined vaccines against leishmaniasis and leprosy. His bio lists more than 400 original publications and 109 issued patents, and he has drawn over $140 million in grants from the NIH, BARDA, DARPA and the Gates Foundation.
What HDT Bio is building
HDT Bio’s AMPLIFY platform pairs self-amplifying replicon RNA with a nanocarrier called LION, instead of the lipid nanoparticle in approved mRNA vaccines. PharmaVoice reported that, unlike those, the formulation can be freeze-dried and stored in an ordinary fridge, which matters for reaching underserved populations. A study in mice found that it triggered only a local reaction rather than system-wide inflammation. Reed credits that to the vaccine staying where it is injected.
The first product to use the technology was the COVID vaccine HGC019, authorized in 2022 through a partnership with the Indian biotech Genova Biopharmaceuticals. COVID vaccines on the same technology were also in trials in Brazil, South Korea and the United States.
The cancer turn is real. The National Cancer Institute’s PREVENT Cancer Program uses AMPLIFY as its only vaccine platform. The company is aiming at prostate, breast, colorectal and pancreatic cancers. Reed described a pipeline of two molecules, one against tumors and one against viruses, and said the anti-viral had just won new Department of Defense funding.
His forecast for the next five years was specific: “at least two new vaccines that are actually approved using the new technology,” plus a handful of phase 2 trials in cancer.
Sources
- Steve Reed – HDT Bio
- Riding the mRNA wave, HDT Bio closes in on cancer-fighting vaccine | PharmaVoice
