Research Interests

   There are 126 known herpesviruses that infect animals and eight herpesviruses that infect humans.  Work in the Halford Lab focuses on two of these viruses: 

  Despite the tendency of these two viruses to infect different sites in the body, HSV-1 and HSV-2 are 99% genetically identical.  About 175 million Americans are latently infected with HSV-1, and ~55 million are latently infected with HSV-2.  Although only 5% of infected people experience frequent, recurrent outbreaks, this translates into roughly 10 million Americans who get recurrent cold sores and 3 million who experience 1 to 4 outbreaks of genital herpes each year.

Research Goals:

   From a basic science viewpoint, results to date offer a new and simple for explaining how HSV-1 "chooses" between productive replication and non-productive infection each time the virus enters a new cell in vivo.

  From the clinical viewpoint, results to date suggest a rational pathway towards developing a safe and effective live vaccine against genital herpes.  Viruses that fail to make a viral interferon antagonist, the ICP0 protein, are unable to cause disease but can establish life-long infections in a healthy animal that can prime the immune system repeatedly over the lifetime of the recipient.  Such live, attenuated viruses are being developed and tested for their potential utility as a live, attenuated vaccine to prevent genital herpes.

Education:

• Ph.D. Louisiana State University Medical School, 1996, Viral immunology
• M.S. Louisiana State University Medical School, 1994, Immunology
• B.S. University of California at Santa Barbara, 1991, Marine Biology

Professional Experience

• 2007- Associate Professor, Medical Microbiology, Immunology & Cell Biology, Southern Illinios University School of Medicine
• 2004-2007 Assistant Professor, Veterinary Molecular Biology, Montana State University
• 2004-2007 Affiliate Assistant Professor, Microbiology, University of Washington
• 2000-2004 Assistant Professor, Microbiology and Immunology, Tulane University
  

Selected Publications

• Halford, W.P. 2007. Towards an effective herpes vaccine: past lessons and future prospects. Future Virology 2: 1-6. (Abstract)
• Austin B.A., Halford W.P., Williams B.R., Carr D.J. 2007. Oligoadenylate synthetase / protein kinase R pathways and α/β TCR+ T cells are required for adenovirus vector: IFN-γ inhibition of herpes simplex virus-1 in cornea. J Immunol. 178: 5166-5172. (Abstract)
• Halford, W.P., J. Grace, C. Weisend, M. Soboleski, D.J.J. Carr, J.W. Balliet, Y. Imai, T.P. Margolis, and B.M. Gebhardt. 2006. ICP0 antagonizes Stat 1-dependent repression of herpes simplex virus: implications for the regulation of viral latency. Virol. J. 3: 44 (Abstract)
• Halford, W.P., J. L. Maender, and B.M. Gebhardt. 2005. Re-evaluating the role of natural killer cells in innate resistance to herpes simplex virus 1. Virol. J. 2: 56 (Abstract)
• A.T. Pierce, J. DeSalvo, T.P. Foster, A. Kosinski, S.K. Weller, and W.P. Halford. 2005. β-interferon and γ-interferon synergize to block viral DNA and virion synthesis in herpes simplex virus-infected cells. J. Gen. Virol. 86: 2421-2432 (Abstract)