Rick Malley

Rick Malley, M.D., began his education at the Ecole Active Bilingue in Paris, France, getting his French Baccalaureate in 1982. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.D. from Tufts University in 1990. He pursued pediatric training at Children’s Hospital Boston, following which he trained in both pediatric infectious diseases and emergency medicine, also at Children’s. In 1997, a chance meeting with Dr. Porter Anderson (one of the co-inventors of the Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate vaccine) led to his interest in the development of a species-specific pneumococcal vaccine for use in developing countries. Under Dr. Anderson’s mentorship, he shifted his research to the development of novel vaccines against pneumococcus, leading to numerous scientific publications describing various aspects of pneumococcal pathogenesis and prevention, such as acquired and innate immunity, correlates of protection, and mechanisms of protection from nasopharyngeal colonization.
Dr. Malley has also had a longstanding interest in predictive models of meningococcal disease and bacterial meningitis in general.
Dr. Malley runs a research laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston, with past and present funding from the Meningitis Research Foundation, NIH and PATH, focusing on innate and acquired immune responses to pneumococci. Dr. Malley is the Kenneth McIntosh Chair in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital Boston and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He provides consultation in infectious diseases and sees patients in the Travel and Geographic Medicine Clinic, which he directs. In collaboration with PATH and the ongoing participation of Dr. Anderson, Dr. Malley is leading an international effort (consisting of researchers from Children’s, Instituto Butantan, Brazil and the University of Goteborg, Sweden) for the development and manufacture of a whole-cell killed pneumococcal vaccine for use in developing countries. Approval from US FDA is being sought to begin Phase I trials in 2011 in the US. He also sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of Genocea Biosciences, a vaccine biotechnology firm in Cambridge MA, and has a scientific collaboration with their group, to identify broadly-conserved CD4+ T cells pneumococcal antigens against colonization and invasive disease.