Amelia Escolano, Ph.D.

Research

The Escolano lab will develop an approach for designing a “universal vaccine” against viruses that rapidly mutate. Viruses such as HIV, SARS-CoV-2, and influenza evade immunity by accumulating mutations that render them invisible to the antibodies produced during previous infections or by vaccines. Development of a universal vaccine would produce “broadly neutralizing antibodies” that could recognize and protect against all potential variants of a virus. As a postdoctoral fellow, I discovered that serial immunization with slightly different viral antigens could produce broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV. Although this was an important achievement, the immune cells in the engineered system I used for these studies all produced the same antibody—a condition that does not capture the complexity of a natural immune response, in which cells producing different antibodies “compete” to determine which will be most effective. Now, using a suite of cutting-edge techniques in cell and molecular genetics—combined with a novel method for labeling antibody-producing immune cells with an identifying bar code—my lab will trace how antibodies evolve in response to repeated exposure to viral antigens, work that could guide the design of more effective vaccine protocols.