The California Hepatitis C Task Force

Patty Perkins is a healthcare consultant and biosciences writer. Since 2009, she has helped clients and academic institutions garner over $200M in extramural grant funding, particularly in infectious diseases. She secured VC funding for the development and deployment of bio devices and diagnostics in infectious and pediatric diseases, along with seed funding for entrepreneurs competing for federal SBIR grants in the bioengineering sector. A former emergency healthcare professional, Patty advises hospitals in the rebuilding of facilities following mass disasters – particularly after hurricanes and flooding. Patty holds graduate degrees in public health and population dynamics (Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene & Public Health), advanced training in emergency and clinical program planning, and advanced certification in infectious diseases modelling, and medical response following mass disasters (UCL and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine).

Patty currently serves as CFO for the CAHCTF and as a special advisor to its vaccine hesitancy and infodemic management project GIANT. She serves as Senior Tech Lead for a Boston and Berkeley CA organization where she funds and monitors infectious diseases pediatric studies conducted at US, UK, and European pediatric settings as part of a Washington DC, San Rafael and Berkeley, CA consortium.

From 2004-2016, she served in consulting roles including program management in higher education. This work included a Co-PI role within the California community colleges (allied health and education in disaster planning, including H5N1 & H1N1 pandemics), as a Co-Director within the CSU system (public health, primary care, and pediatric asthma), as an advisor to the UCSF Dept of Medicine’s Clinical and Behavioral HIV & AIDS programs, and as the initial Managing Director for the amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research at UCSF.

Through work in program management within drug & alcohol and harm reduction settings, Patty worked extensively in HCV in NYC, Los Angeles, and the SF Bay Area, including in the conduct, management, and analysis of a pharma-company funded, multi-city HCV screening program conducted at a major drug treatment program, resulting in more emphasis on clinical follow-up and improved management of the clinical course of HCV, and vaccine delivery for Hepatitis A & B. In NYC, Patty co-authored and then co-directed, with Drs. David Perlman and Nadim Salomon, an NIH-NIDA funded program for tuberculosis-HIV screening and treatment for New York's Beth Israel Medical Center (Mt. Sinai Medical Center system) with clinic sites at the Lower East Side Needle Exchange Program and Beth Israel's in-patient drug detoxification unit. She also served as a co-investigator for the NYC site of the NIH-NIAID funded >Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS). Research in HIV and women drew on experiences in running contraceptive clinical trials for the Population Council, the developer of NORPLANT™, the Mirena™ IUD, and prototypes for the microbicide griffithsin™, under the leadership of the late Dr. Wayne Bardin and earlier in the laboratory of Dr. Neal A. Musto.

Patty assisted in the development of the original NDA application for RU 486 (mifepristone), which is included in the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. The Population Council assumed all rights to this drug as a donation without remuneration from the French pharma company Roussel-Uclaf. The drug’s approval process began in France in 1988, the drug finally won approval by the US FDA in 2000, some ten years after the original FDA submission. Finally, Patty developed a particular interest in vaccine technology while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, where she worked on studies with the late Mary Lou Clemens, MD, for the vaccine that became RotaShield™, an oral vaccine for rotavirus.

She conducted bench science and early Phase 1 trial research in the immunology laboratories of the late Dr. Noel Rose, and the lab of Dr. Ahvie Herskovitz (now Medical Director of the SF Bay Area-based Antara Medicine), specifically on host T-cell immune responses to cardiomyopathies induced by pathogens such as Coxsackie B & B-3 viruses. Through other NIH and PAHO funds, she conducted studies with Dr. Steve Nickell (recently retired from the California Department of Public Health Immunization Branch) on both murine (mouse) and human host’s T-cell response to the parasite Trypanosoma Cruzi, which causes Chagas Disease, and is endemic in Brazil and parts of Central and Latin America.