Kevan Herold, MD, newly named as C.N.H. Long Professor of Immunobiology and of Medicine, conducts research on the basis for autoimmune diseases and develops new therapies based on these studies. His focus has largely been in the field of autoimmune Type 1 diabetes.
After spending 20 years teaching and conducting research at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, Herold joined Yale in 2006 as a professor of immunobiology and internal medicine. His work has spanned a number of aspects of the pathogenesis of autoimmune diabetes including the immune mechanisms and the effects of autoimmunity on beta cells, with studies in preclinical and with clinical samples. A large portion of his studies involve understanding how immune therapies modify pathogenic immune responses. He has pioneered the development of anti-CD3 antibody, that disrupts the immune system’s destruction of beta cells and recently was shown to be the first drug to delay or prevent Type 1 diabetes. His lab identified a subpopulation of beta cells that appear to resist immune attack. He developed an assay to measure β cell death in vivo and described changes in beta cells that occur in response to immunologic stressors that may enable their survival.
Herold’s laboratory has a longstanding interest in developing tools to analyze autoantigen specific T cells in patients with Type 1 diabetes and has used Class I MHC tetramers to analyze these cells in clinical trials; he more recently developed T cell libraries for this purpose. His group was the first to identify autoimmune diabetes induced with checkpoint inhibitors which has provided insights into the mechanisms of Type 1 diabetes.
Herold is a member of the Immune Tolerance Network Steering Committee and the principal investigator of the Yale Trial Net Center. He serves as deputy director for translational medicine in the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation and is a member of steering committees for TrialNet and the Immune Tolerance Network, consortia developed to conduct clinical trials for treatment and prevention of autoimmune diseases.
A graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Herold earned his M.D. from Jefferson Medical College. His research is supported by grants from federal agencies and private foundations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and the American Diabetes Association, Inc., among other organizations. This work has been widely published in professional journals, policy briefs, and chapters in edited books.