Anthony Griffiths is the new director of Mizzou’s Laboratory for Infectious Disease Research and a new Bond LSC principal investigator. | Photo by Braiden Wade
By Sarah Rubinstein
Growing up in ’70s and ’80s Britain, 10-year-old Anthony Griffiths’ brain had the dangers of rabies seared into it during European vacations. At the time, rabies hadn’t made its way to Britain but was present throughout the continent, and the public service announcement posters were a fearful reminder to remain vigilant. While messages warning against smuggling unquarantined pets into the country scared most children with statements like “rabies means death” and “rabies is a killer,” Griffiths was curious. He went to the library instead, checked out a book — “Rabies: The Facts” and his interest in virology was born.
“I’m the luckiest person in the world, who’s done exactly what I have always, always wanted to do,” he said.
The British native arrived at Mizzou in July to become the newest director of the university’s Laboratory for Infectious Disease Research (LIDR) and a principal investigator at Bond Life Sciences Center.
Griffiths has spent his career researching viruses in high and maximum biocontainment labs, working to understand how they cause disease and how the information he finds can be used to develop vaccines and therapeutics for those viruses.
“Viruses are so simple, they are not even alive, but they are so devastating,” he said. “Understanding how something so simple can have such an impact is fascinating.”
He received his Ph.D. in virology at the University of Cambridge and studied herpes viruses at Harvard Medical School, focusing on the cellular biology of herpes and using antiviral agents to probe how the virus causes disease. Then he began his own infectious disease laboratory at Texas Biomedical Research Institute where his team mostly analyzed viruses at biosafety levels three and four (BSL-3 and BSL-4). Biosafety level four is the highest classification of biological safety used when working with the highest risk viruses. In Texas, he looked at a pathogenic zoonotic virus that causes herpes B virus. He also worked on more “famous” viruses like Ebola.