麻豆传媒

Shane Crotty, Ph.D., and his team study immunity against infectious diseases. They investigate how the immune system remembers infections and vaccines. By remembering infections and vaccines, the body is protected from becoming infected in the future. Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective medical treatments in modern civilization and are responsible for saving millions of lives. Yet, good vaccines are very difficult to design, and very few new vaccines have been made in the past 10 years. A better understanding of immune memory will facilitate the ability to make new vaccines. Dr. Tony Fauci, NIH, referred to some of the Crotty lab work as “exceedingly important to the field of immunogen design.”
Dr. Crotty is a member of the LJI Coronavirus Task Force. The Crotty Lab, in close collaboration with the lab of LJI Professor Alessandro Sette, Dr. Biol. Sci., was the first to publish a detailed analysis of the immune system’s response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (). The made a number of important findings. Most importantly, it showed that the immune system activates all three major branches of “adaptive immunity” (which learns to recognize specific viruses) to try to fight the virus: CD4 “helper” T cells , CD8 “killer” T cells, and antibodies. The LJI team found good immune responses to multiple different parts of SARS-CoV-2 (imagine the virus is made out of legos, and the immune system can recognize different individual legos), including the Spike protein, which is the main target of almost all COVID-19 vaccine efforts.
Dr. Crotty has a major focus studying human immune responses to vaccines. His lab is hard at work on candidate HIV vaccines with the CHAVID consortium. His lab is also hard at work on vaccine strategies for influenza, strep throat, and COVID-19. The Crotty lab studies new vaccine ideas and strategies that may be applicable to many diseases, based on a fundamental understanding of the underlying immune responses, and how the cells of the immune system interact. 
Dr. Crotty regularly does media outreach on vaccines and immunity to infectious diseases. Dr. Crotty is also the author of Ahead of the Curve, a biography of Nobel laureate scientist David Baltimore, published in 2001, and reviewed in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He earned his B.S. in Biology and Writing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology/Virology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2001.

Dr. Garc铆a-Sastre is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. For the past 25 years, his research interest has been focused on the molecular biology of influenza viruses and several other negative-strand RNA viruses. During his post-doctoral training in the early 1990s, he developed, for the first time, novel strategies for expression of foreign antigens by a negative-strand RNA virus, influenza virus. He has made major contributions to the influenza virus field, including 1) the development of reverse genetics techniques allowing the generation of recombinant influenza viruses from plasmid DNA, (studies in collaboration with Dr. Palese); 2) the generation and evaluation of negative-strand RNA virus vectors as potential vaccine candidates against different infectious diseases, including malaria and AIDS, and 3) the identification of the biological role of the non-structural protein NS1 of influenza virus during infection: the inhibition of the type I interferon (IFN) system. His studies provided the first description and molecular analysis of a viral-encoded IFN antagonist among negative-strand RNA viruses.  These studies led to the generation of attenuated influenza viruses containing defined mutations in their IFN antagonist protein that might prove to be optimal live vaccines against influenza. His research has resulted in more than 480 scientific publications and reviews. Dr. Garc铆a-Sastre is the director of the Center for Research on Influenza Pathogenesis (CRIP), one of the five NIAID funded Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance. He was among the first members of the Vaccine Study Section and member of the Virology B Study Section of NIH. In addition, he has served for 5 years as Editor of Journal of Experimental Medicine, is Editor of PLoS Pathogens, Journal of Virology and Virus Research, and member of the Editorial Board of Virology, Vaccine, NPJ Vaccines and Influenza and Other Respiratory Diseases.  He is a member of the scientific advisory board of Keystone Symposia. He has been a co-organizer of the international course on Viral Vectors (2001), held in Heidelberg, Germany, sponsored by Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), and of the first Research Conference on Orthomyxoviruses in 2001, held in Texel, The Netherlands, sponsored by the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI). He has also been a co-organizing of the 7th International Society for Vaccines meeting in 2013, and of Keystone Meetings in 2014 on Respiratory Virus Pathogenesis and in 2017 on Interferons. His publication in Science on the reconstruction and characterization of the pandemic influenza virus of 1918 has been awarded the distinction of the paper of the year 2005 by Lancet. In 2005, he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and in 2009, he received the Beijerink Professorship from the National Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands. In 2011, he has been elected President of the International Society for Vaccines, for 2014 and 2015. In 2017, he has been elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Pharmacy in Spain.

Dr. S. Wesley Long received his MD degree in 2007 from The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston TX, where he also earned a PhD in Experimental Pathology. After finishing his doctoral studies, Dr. Long completed a clinical pathology residency at Houston Methodist. He currently serves as a member of the Editorial Board for Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Long’s research centers on functional genomics of multidrug-resistant bacterial strains to identify novel drug targets. He is currently focusing his work on MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and Klebsiella pneumoniae, both of which readily acquire resistance to several different types of antibiotics and are prevalent in the hospital setting.

Arvind Varsani is a molecular virologist who works across ecosystems from plants to animals and from the tropics to polar regions. Arvind Varsani and his collaborators have focused on addressing the diversity, demographics and evolutionary dynamics of viral communities in various ecosystems. Studies in the last decade have shown that viruses are the most common and abundant entities on earth, yet very little is known about their evolution and ecosystem roles. Our current knowledge of viruses is heavily biased to those that cause disease in humans, animals and plants. This equates to a very small portion of the viral diversity on the planet and a very minute fraction of the virome associated with humans, animals and plants. His broad research objectives are to: 1) study viral dynamics in Antarctica ecosystem, the least human-altered marine system on the planet 2) unravel the viral evolutionary dynamics as a consequence of climate change; 3) study viral ecological interaction networks within a microbiome and more broadly within phytobiomes in order to unravel the dynamics of pathogen emergence.

Efrem Lim is an expert in viruses, biomedicine, microbiology and molecular biology. He is a virologist and an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences, and the Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics. Lim's research focuses on viromes, microbiomes and the SARS-CoV-2 viral strain. Professor Lim created the "Lim Lab" at ASU which integrates molecular virology and bioinformatics approaches in clinical cohorts.

Professor Buchmeier is interested in the pathogenesis and control of emerging viral infections, the structure and function of viral proteins and glycoproteins, in antiviral drug design, and the mechanisms by which viruses interact with the host during persistent infection. Also of interest are the ways in which viruses contribute to a variety of autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.

 explores molecular diversity and how molecular structure determines biological function in plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of significance to agriculture. He studies the origin, structure, and evolution of genomes, proteomes, RNomes, and functionomes for applications including bioengineering, biomedicine, and systems biology.
More information: 
Caetano-Anollés' atelier of evolutionary bioinformatics and plant bioinformation focuses on creative ways to mine, visualize and integrate data from structural and functional genomic research. His group is particularly interested in the evolution of macromolecular structure and networks in biology, the reconstruction of evolutionary history, the incorporation of evolutionary considerations in genomic research, the study of levels and patterns of genome-wide mutation, and processes that are linked to co-evolutionary phenomena (such as plant pathogenesis and symbiosis). In particular, his research has been productive in two specific areas, the evolution of the structure of macromolecules and the molecular basis of biodiversity.
Affiliations: 
Caetano-Anollés is a professor of bioinformatics in the  in the  (ACES) and health innovation professor in the  at the . He is also a faculty affiliate in the .