Janet K Yamamoto | Professor of Immunology and Director of LCIV-CA
University of Florida

Dr. Janet K. Yamamoto is currently a professor of immunology and virology in the Department of Comparative, Diagnostic, and Population Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. in immunology with a minor in virology from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1981. She co-discovered and co-patented the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) at the University of California, Davis (UCD) in 1986-1987. She is the first to demonstrate, together with Nobel laureate Dr. Francoise Barré-Sonoussi, that interferon-gamma will not protect against HIV-1. She was the major consultant in the development of the second FDA approved HIV-1 immunoblot test for humans by Bio-Rad Laboratories in 1988. She has previously worked on feline coronavirus serotype 1 (FCoV1) infection of laboratory cats in 1987 at UCD to test her feline interferon-omega as FCoV therapy. This drug is currently sold by Torray Industry in Japan and Virbac in Europe as a therapy for canine parvovirus, FIV, and feline leukemia virus. At the University of Florida, her laboratory developed an FIV vaccine technology that was licensed by Fort Dodge Animal Health (Division of Wyeth) and later sold by Pfizer-Zoetis, and Boehringer, which was released as the Fel-O-Vax FIV® vaccine in U.S. in 2002, Canada in 2003, Australia and New Zealand in 2004, and Japan in 2008. She is currently the director of the Laboratory of Comparative Immunology and Virology for Companion Animals (LCIV-CA), which develops veterinary diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. She and her colleagues recently discovered that sera from FCoV1 infected cats cross-reacts strongly with SARS-CoV2 receptor binding domain (RBD), vice versa. This discovery has led to LCIV-CA’s current research program on the development of pan-coronavirus vaccine against SARS-CoV2 and common cold HαCoV in humans and against FCoV and CCoV in cats and dogs. LCIV-CA will soon release immunoblot strip diagnostics to differentiate FCoV1 and FCoV2 as well as a sensitive antibody diagnostic to evaluate FIPV infection status in pet cats with fatal FIP undergoing nucleoside-analog GS44154 (Remdesivir metabolite) therapy. Other LCIV-CA’s research efforts consist of HIV and FIV vaccine development, HIV/FIV drug and immunotherapy, use of SARS-CoV2/FCoV and FIV-FAIDS as a small animal model of humans, and feline/canine stem cell factors and cytokines for immunotherapy and as vaccine adjuvants.