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.

LJI Associate Professor Sonia Sharma, Ph.D., is an expert in using unbiased, genome-scale approaches to unravel innate immunity, the body’s early immune response to microbial pathogens and neoplastic cells. Innate immunity has also been implicated as a common causal factor in many inflammatory, allergic and autoimmune diseases. Dr. Sharma integrates cutting-edge genetics, biochemistry, cell biology, computational and translational approaches to define the key genetic mechanisms regulating cellular innate immunity and determine how they impact human health and disease.
Dr. Sharma has an outstanding record of research accomplishments, including high impact discoveries published in top scientific journals. Her work has made her an internationally recognized expert in the use of high throughput, genome scale approaches, in particular RNA interference and CRISPR/Cas9, to dissect complex cellular signaling pathways and questions of immunological relevance. Her use of these technologies is a powerful tool that can be applied to any cellular pathway or disease process.
Dr. Sharma also directs the La Jolla Institute for Immunology's Sex-Based Differences in the Immune System Initiative, which aims to shed light on why many diseases affect men and women differently.

Dr. Tal Einav’s accomplishments included the development of sophisticated computational methods to understand viral behavior and predict how individuals react to vaccination or infection. This research earned Einav a prestigious Damon Runyon Quantitative Biology Fellowship and emphasized the importance of pursuing machine learning to analyze big data in immunology.
“We have these tremendous datasets that we’re just barely tapping into,” says Einav. These data allow Einav to understand the immune response in different contexts, from the young to the elderly, from healthy people to individuals who are immunocompromised. All with the goal to discover key patterns that let us understand and harness our immunity. Einav’s work has already demonstrated that blending biophysics and computer science enables researchers to predict the antibody response against new viral variants.
This work paves the way for a fundamentally new form of personalized medicine. For example, Einav imagines tailoring an individualized vaccine strain or dosage based on a patient’s specific antibody repertoire to create a stronger response that lasts for years, if not their entire life.