Dr. Lorne Tyrell

Chair, Institute of Health Economics and Professor and CIHR/ GSK Chair in Virology, University of Alberta

The former Dean of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta, Dr. Lorne Tyrrell is the Chair of the Board, Institute of Health Economics. He is the CIHR/GlaxoSmithKline Chair in Virology at the University of Alberta. Dr. Tyrrell is also the Chair of the Board of the Alberta Health Quality Council and Chair of the Gairdner Foundation and a member of the Research Council of the Canadian Institute of Academic Research.

A medical specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases, Dr. Tyrrell began working with Dr. Morris Robins in 1986 on a system to identify potent antivirals against hepatitis B virus (HBV) which infects about 400 million people worldwide. Through their work they discovered several potent antivirals against HBV and this resulted in a major collaboration with Glaxo Canada (now GlaxoSmithKline).

The collaboration led to the discovery that lamivudine had potent antiviral activity for HBV and today lamivudine is licensed worldwide as the first oral antiviral for the treatment of HBV infections. Lamivudine has been shown to decrease the development of cirrhosis or liver cancer in chronic HBV carriers. This work also reopened the option for resuming liver transplantation in patients with end-stage liver disease from HBV. More recently Dr. Tyrrell collaborated with Drs. D. Mercer and N. Kneteman to develop the first small animal model to support HCV replication.

Dr. Tyrrell has won numerous awards at the University of Alberta (Rutherford Undergraduate Teaching Award, J. Gordin Kaplan Research Awards, and the University Cup). He won the ASTech Award for Research in 1993 and the Gold Medal of the Canadian Liver Foundation in 2000.

Dr. Tyrrell was appointed to the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2000, an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2002, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004. He was awarded the F.N.G. Starr Award from the Canadian Medical Association in 2004, the Principal Award of the Manning Foundation in 2005 for his work on the development of oral antivirals for the treatment of HBV, and inducted into the CMA Hall of Fame in 2011.