Patrick Arbuthnot is a personal professor and director of the Wits/SAMRC Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit (AGTRU). After completing medical studies and a PhD, he worked on gene therapy as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Christiaan Bréchot at Necker Hospital in Paris. On returning to South Africa, Patrick established the AGTRU, which has now published widely on gene therapy-based methods to counter infection with hepatitis B virus and other pathogens. Recently the team has engaged with the WHO, Medicines Patent Pool, various governments, philanthropies and industry to establish an African mRNA vaccine technology platform. Research in the unit is also advancing use of recombinant adenoviral vectors and yeast-expressed proteins as vaccines.