Marco Weinberg

Prof. Marco Weinberg is a biochemist and molecular biologist whose research career has focused on the study of gene regulation and the role of engineered nucleic acids as novel therapeutics. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, South Africa and concurrently an Assistant Professor at the Scripps Research Institute, California, USA.

He has pioneered the use of fast-cleaving hammerhead ribozymes, short hairpin RNAs, long hairpin RNAs, mirtrons, aptamers and CRISPR tools as powerful gene silencing agents against viral diseases and cancer. His work on antisense non-coding RNAs as epigenetic modulators of gene expression has opened-up several new avenues for translational research using novel strategies to silence (and activate) viral genes. Prof. Weinberg has published over 55 papers with several in prestigious international journals and is rated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) as a leading international scholar.

He has successfully graduated 20 doctoral/masters students and several postdoctoral fellows and is on the editorial board of Molecular Therapy and the South African Journal of Science. Lastly, Prof. Weinberg is an inventor on 6 international patents and co-founder/director of Zetta Genomics International, a start-up company involved in clinical next generation sequencing analytics.