Stavros Selemidis

Professor Stavros Selemidis is a pharmacologist and the head of the Oxidant and Inflammation Biology Group (OXIB) in the STEM College and School of Health and Biomedical Sciences (SHBS) at RMIT University. Stavros is also the CSO of the Biotech Company ViraLok Therapeutics Pty Ltd that he founded at RMIT. Stavros is internationally and nationally recognized for his fundamental and clinically translational research which aims to unravel novel disease paradigms and therapeutic targets for respiratory viruses including influenza (IAV), common cold and COVID-19 in humans and livestock industries. To achieve this Stavros has assembled and leads a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural and gender balanced research team of postdocs, research assistants, HDRs, Honours and WiLstudents at RMIT. Stavros is an integral leader of a large international research program consisting of a consortium of researchers and clinicians that investigate viral and cancer disease mechanisms with a developmental pipeline for therapeutic development and commercialization. His research program is a 3 pillar strategy entailing: Fundamental Biology; Pharmacology and Drug discovery and Pre-clinical Translational Biology all 3 of which are channeling novel IP intoViraLok Therapeutics, which is the entity for translational and commercialization outcomes.

Stavros has >65 peer reviewed publications in some of the highest impact international journals (ave impact factor 8.72; >94% Q1) including Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Communications, Molecular Cancer, Gastroenterology and PNAS. He has a H-index of 32 with >4,100 citations, and a significant number of these publications are linked to his HDR supervision. Stavros has held prestigious and highly competitive National based fellowships from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC). Stavros' prestigious research fellowships served as a strong foundation for garnering a continuous stream of competitive Category 1 and 3 funding including a total of ~$15 Mill as a chief/partner investigator, of which ~$6M obtained as the lead investigator. Since being recruited to RMIT at the beginning of 2017, Stavros has led an international consortium of commercially funded work that has confidentiality/patent agreements and licensing agreements, which facilitated the advent of ViraLok Therapeutics Pty Ltd. As the CSO of ViraLok Therapeutics, Stavros is the lead investigator of all pre-clinical studies including an international COVID-19 pre-clinical trial and the lead scientist for current and future Big Pharmaceutical company engagement.

Stavros' international reputation as a respiratory and cardiovascular pharmacologist led to sustained and ongoing senior contributions to National government agencies including NHMRC, consisting of NHMRC Grant Review and Fellowship Panels and as an expert peer reviewer of international grant proposals. Stavros has served on international society committees, and is currently a Deputy editor of the leading Australasian Respiratory Disease Journal, Respirology.

Stavros has been invited to present at prestigious Gordon Research conferences, and to >50 local and international conferences and institutions, including in clinically relevant Hospital Grand Round seminar series in major national hospitals. Stavros has graduated multiple HDR students who have undertaken post-doctoral positions in exclusive universities including King’s College London, Harvard University and University of California and who have built careers in academia and industry. Stavros actively contributes to internal RMIT based committees including being a member of the RMIT animal ethics committee as well as the SEH/STEM college OHS committee.

Industry experience:
2021 - Service agreement with Viroclinics (Netherlands)
2020 - Advent of ViraLoK Therapeutics Pty Ltd.
2020 - Chief Scientist of ViraLoK Therapeutics Pty Ltd.
2014 - ongoing- Collaborator with Envision Sciences Pty Ltd.

Awards:
2021 STEM College Research Excellence Award as part of the 2021 STEM College Staff Awards.
2019 Winner of the Fukuchi Award in 2019, awarded by the Asian Pacific Society of Respirology for the most outstanding research paper published in Respirology. Title: Novel endosomal NOX2 oxidase inhibitor ameliorates pandemic influenza A virus‐induced lung inflammation in mice. Respirology, 24, 1011-1017.
2018 RMIT Research Awards: RMIT Award for Research Excellence- Team Award Chronic Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases.
2014 Winner of the Best Scientific Presentation at the Cell Biology Section of TSANZ conference in Adelaide, April, 2014.
2012 Winner of the Best Scientific Presentation at the Cell Biology Section of TSANZ conference in Canberra, April, 2012.
2005 Denis Wade Johnson & Johnson Young Investigator award for the Proceedings of the Australian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology (ASCEPT) 2005, Melbourne Australia.
2000 Winner of the Best Scientific Presentation at the 3rd workshop on Endothelium-dependent hyperpolarising factor (EDHF) in Paris, June, 2000.