Tufts University Professor Named Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

Charles “Chuck” Shoemaker, a professor in the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Election as an academy fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. The NAI was founded to recognize and encourage inventors with U.S. patents and enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation.

Shoemaker and other fellows will be honored at the NAI annual meeting next June in Atlanta. This year’s fellows include Nobel Prize winners and recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation and National Medal of Science; as a group, they hold over 5,000 issued U.S. patents.

All of the new NAI fellows “are tackling real-world issues and creating solutions that propel us into the future. Through their work, they are making significant contributions to science, creating lasting societal impact, and growing the economy,” says Paul Sanberg, president of the NAI.

Shoemaker started his career at Genetics Institute Inc. after a postdoc at MIT, then went on to do research and to teach at Harvard. “I wanted to apply the tools of biotech, which I learned in the early biotech industry, to developing-world diseases such as schistosomiasis,” he says.

In 1995, Shoemaker accepted leadership of animal health research in New Zealand at the government-owned company AgResearch, focusing primarily on internal parasites and bovine tuberculosis. He retained an adjunct associate professorship at Harvard until 2004.

He has been a professor at Tufts since 2003, running a lab at Cummings School and collaborating with other labs at Tufts and many other academic institutions and companies.

Shoemaker’s work has revolved around developing antibody immunotherapeutics that can be targeted to prevent and cure disease. He uses tiny VHH ‘mini-antibodies’ (also known as nanobodies) that are cloned from immunized alpacas. These antibody fragments retain target binding properties, but are more stable and far easier to engineer than conventional antibodies. The VHH targets range from a variety of toxins and enteric pathogens to respiratory viruses and cancer.

Because it’s easier to prevent a disease than cure it once it has been established in the body, Shoemaker’s lab and collaborators are working to create cost-effective prophylactic VHH-based agents that can trap invasive viruses or bacteria and prevent them from infecting cells and initiating disease. “You can link many of these tiny and stable VHHs into multivalent agents having enhanced potencies and target range that are suited to purpose,” he says.

“This honor reflects the outstanding and valuable work that Professor Shoemaker has made over an illustrious career,” says Bernard Arulanandam, vice provost for research at Tufts and an NAI fellow. “His work has transformed lives, and we are proud of his induction into the National Academy of Inventors.”