National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 4P01AI167966-02

Core C: Viral Evolution

This award funds the Viral Evolution Core to develop tools for engineering vaccines targeting pandemic-risk coronaviruses by studying viral protein properties and antibody interactions.

Description

The Viral Evolution Core will develop tools to inform the engineering of vaccines that broadly target coronaviruses that pose a pandemic risk. The core will use deep mutational scanning to define the biochemical and functional properties of RBDs and spikes across the full evolutionary span of sarbecoviruses and merbecoviruses, and systematically map how these proteins are targeted by vaccine-elicited antibody immunity. The project includes measuring receptor-binding properties of all known sarbecovirus and merbecovirus RBDs, developing a system to measure how mutations to spikes affect cell entry, and quantifying the binding breadth and robustness to mutations of vaccine elicited monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies.

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