Walter Fiers
Walter Fiers (* 1931 in Ypres ) is a Belgian molecular biologist. He was a pioneer in the sequencing of genomes and in recombinant DNA technology and research on influenza vaccines.
Fiers studied chemical engineering ( and agricultural engineering ) at the University of Ghent ( completion 1954). After that, he conducted research on enzymes in Laurent Vandendriessche in Ghent and 1956/57, at Heinz Holter in Copenhagen. In 1960 he went with a Rockefeller scholarship to Robert Sinsheimer to Caltech, where he dealt with phage research. Then he went to the University of Wisconsin- Madison Gobind Khorana to. In 1962 he returned to Belgium and founded the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Ghent. In 1997 he went as a professor and a year later as head of the laboratory to retire, but did research on.
It was the first fully sequenced a gene (1972, wherein the bacteriophage MS2 ) and a complete viral genome ( also in MS 2, consisting of four genes ) sequenced (1976). In 1978, he and his group sequenced the genome of the simian virus SV 40
In the early 1980s he was one of the pioneers of the recombinant DNA technology. He and his colleagues cloned in 1980, the genes for interferon beta ( same as Tadatsugu Taniguchi in Japan) and later interleukin 2, interferon gamma and tumor necrosis factor. In medical applications, he worked there together with Biogen ( which led to the first clinical trials with interferon gamma ).
In the 1990s, he conducted research on vaccines against influenza viruses. They are based on the M2 viral protein that occurs in all human influenza viruses and thus offers the chance of acting against many strains of influenza "universal" vaccine.