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Richard Sutton, MD, PhD

After finishing his undergraduate studies at Brown University, Dr. Richard Sutton enrolled in the MSTP at Stanford, where he obtained his PhD degree with Dr. John Boothroyd, working on African trypanosomes.  He then completed a categorical residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship in infectious diseases at UCSF.  After post-doctoral stints with Drs. Harold Varmus, Dan Littman, and Pat Brown in which he worked on HTLV cell binding and entry and the development of HIV-based gene therapy vectors, he joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine.  In 2008 he was recruited to Yale University School of Medicine to continue his work on HIV replication and lentiviral vectors.  Dr. Sutton spends approximately 75% of his time at the research bench and 25% in the clinical setting, both out-patient (HIV and general infectious diseases) and in-patient (internal medicine and infectious diseases).

The focus of Dr. Sutton’s basic science research effort is the molecular biology of HIV replication, in which he is attempting to identify novel host factors involved in the viral life cycle and to develop a small animal model of HIV/AIDS.  He is also involved in a project of whole exome sequencing of so-called ‘Elite Controllers’, patients who are somehow able to suppress HIV replication in the absence of medications.  This may help identify coding variants of genes that are involved in viral replication, which should inform both the therapeutic and vaccine effort.  Another translational project Dr. Sutton is involved with is the development and testing of a novel, multiple cycle ‘replication capacity’ assay of HIV, which may help improve decision making in terms of choice of antiretrovirals when viral drug resistance develops.

Dr. Sutton is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health, the State of Connecticut, and the Department of Defense.  He has served as a reviewer on NIH peer review study sections for the last decade, and reviews manuscripts on an ad hoc basis for journals such as Journal of Virology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Blood, and Nature Biotechnology.  He also serves on Yale’s Recombinant DNA and Institutional Biosafety committees.  In his spare time, Dr. Sutton enjoys bicycling, alpine skiing, and sailing.  He lives with his wife Sarah, who is also his lab manager, and his daughters in Woodbridge, CT.