Bio
Dr. Brad Spellberg, a Sharecare expert, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He received his BA in Molecular Cell Biology-Immunology in 1994 from UC Berkeley. He then attended medical school at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he received numerous academic honors, including serving as the UCLA AOA Chapter Co-President, and winning the prestigious Stafford Warren award for the topic academic performance in his graduating class. Dr. Spellberg completed his Residency in Internal Medicine and subspecialty fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he received the Department of Medicine Subspecialty Fellow of the Year award.
Dr. Spellberg works as an academic hospitalist, attending on the inpatient medicine wards. His research is diverse, ranging from basic immunology and vaccinology to pure clinical research and outcomes research. His laboratory research has focused on developing a vaccine that targets the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus and the fungus Candida; the vaccine is undergoing clinical development. Dr. Spellberg is currently working on the immunology and vaccinology of highly resistant Acinetobacter infections. He also has served as the PI of a multi-centered, randomized, double-blinded placebo controlled study of iron chelation adjunctive therapy for mucormycosis. More recently, Dr. Spellberg has begun research programs in infection prevention, using a novel disinfectant technology, and healthcare policy research focusing on medical education and medical documentation. Dr. Spellberg serves as Medical Director for Clinical Research Solutions, a clinical trials unit co-founded with Dr. Darrell Harrington, Chief of General Internal Medicine, which supports conduct of clinical research at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Dr. Spellberg has worked with the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) to attempt to bring attention to the problems of increasing drug resistance and decreasing new antibiotics. His research regarding new drug development has been a cornerstone of the IDSA’s white paper, Bad Bugs, No Drugs, and has been cited extensively in medical literature and on Capitol Hill. He is a Fellow in the IDSA and joined the IDSA’s Antimicrobial Availability Task Force (AATF) to continue working on this critical problem. As a member of the AATF, he has first-authored a consensus IDSA position paper on the appropriate clinical trial design for Community Acquired Pneumonia, a multi-society position paper on clinical trial conduct for nosocomial pneumonia, and a systematic review of historical literature as a basis for conducting clinical trials for skin infections. Finally, Dr. Spellberg is the author of Rising Plague, which he wrote to inform and educate the public about the crisis in antibiotic resistant infections and lack of antibiotic development.
