Jack Gauldie ’64

Gene therapeutics – the use of the gene as a drug – is expected to revolutionize health care, leading to advances in preventing, diagnosing and treating diseases from asthma to cancer. At the forefront of this research is Dr. Jack Gauldie, chair of pathology and molecular medicine. An expert in cytokine biology, inflammation and immunology, Gauldie is director of McMaster’s Centre for Gene Therapeutics. Since 1997, the Centre has teamed up the University with local hospitals to work on creating and implementing state–of–the–art gene transfer therapies for cancer and inflammatory and infectious diseases.

Gauldie will also be the lead investigator for McMaster’s new Institute for Molecular Medicine and Health, which has received some $25–million in federal and provincial funding. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he hopes to see gene therapeutics become as cheap and effective in preventing and treating chronic degenerative illness as vaccination has been in preventing infectious disease.