Karen Sims earned her combined MD/PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her PhD in Neuroscience focused on regulation of the activity and cell surface expression of the neuronal glutamate transporter EAAC1. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed a post-doctoral fellowship studying the molecular mechanisms of Epstein Barr Virus lymphoproliferation and lymphomagenesis. As an attending physician at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, she specialized in the care of inpatient and outpatient solid organ transplant recipients and immunocompromised hosts including HIV-positive individuals. She also maintained an active translational research project examining the role of the innate immune protein surfactant protein D in acute lung allograft rejection.
Dr. Sims joined the Virology Exploratory Clinical and Translational Research group at Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2010, leading Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in both HCV and HIV. She was responsible for numerous clinical trials evaluating the HCV direct-acting antivirals daclatasvir, asunaprevir, and beclabuvir, the HIV antiretrovirals atazanavir and efavirenz, as well as other novel HCV and HIV compounds. In 2015, Dr. Sims moved to the Immunoscience group at BMS and initiated a new clinical program in Sjogren’s syndrome including a global Phase 2 combination trial, as well as leading early phase clinical programs in Ulcerative Colitis.
In 2017 Dr. Sims joined Arbutus Biopharma as Senior Medical Director and has held positions of increasing responsibility managing the clinical and medical safety aspects of all clinical trials and HBV assets in the Arbutus pipeline. Arbutus has had a diverse pipeline of HBV clinical programs targeting multiple mechanisms of action including capsid assembly modulators, RNA destabilizers, small molecule PD-L1 inhibitors (lead candidate AB-101 currently in a Phase 1 clinical trial) and the GalNAc-conjugated siRNA imdusiran, formerly AB-729 (currently in multiple Phase 2 clinical trials). She was named Chief Medical Officer in 2023.
