Eckard Wimmer (born 22 May 1936) is a German American virologist, organic chemist and distinguished professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University.
He is best known for his seminal work on the molecular biology of poliovirus and the first chemical synthesis of a viral genome capable of infection and subsequent production of live viruses.
He and his family moved to Stony Brook University on Long Island, NY, in 1974 to join the Department of Microbiology, School of Medicine, an academic environment in which he continued to engage.
Wimmer's major early accomplishment, spearheaded by Naomi Kitamura and other members of his laboratory, was the elucidation in 1981 of the structure and genetic organization of the poliovirus genome,[4] the first sequence of a eukaryotic RNA virus.
These studies were the basis for the discovery of the "internal ribosome entry site" (IRES) in a picornavirus genome by Sung Key Jang (1988),[10][11] independently described also by Nahum Sonenberg and his colleagues.
An IRES chimeric oncolytic poliovirus [PV (RIPO)], originally constructed in Wimmer's laboratory,[12] has now been developed by Matthias Gromeier at Duke University for the treatment of human glioma.
[15] A decade-long collaboration with Michael Rossmann’s laboratory and Steffen Mueller in Wimmer's lab has yielded the crystal structure of the two outer domains of CD155, an achievement that has solved the architecture of the poliovirus/receptor complex.
Many investigators have since used this strategy involving a cell "juice" void of the barrier of a cellular membrane, of nuclei or of mitochondria, for the study of key steps in poliovirus translation and genome replication.
[20] Meanwhile, synthetic biology has led to a new kind of RNA virus genetics[21] and has been used to develop rapid methods for computer-aided chemical synthesis of viral recoded genomes.